WereWHAT!
by Fuzzy Necromancer
Summary: Were-beast adventure. See a main character's head explode! See one of the titans get eaten temporarily ! See one of our heroes slowly transformed into a loathsome and cute monstrosity! Contains light weight gain and vore. Raven left in this fantinuum
1. Chapter 1

"Aaaah yes," a voice whispered out. It was a young voice, but it was cracked and strangled by cynicism, bitterness, and dementia beyond its years. "At last, here is the final piece. I already have the golden artifact and the stillborn specimen." A spidery hand crawled over to a glass case, hanging from a long silk-robed arm. It carefully traced the brief and faded text which accompanied the relic:

_Discovered in Andes foothills, 1743 by anonymous explorer. Skull of large rodent, full body believed to be over two feet long. Teeth and cheekbones contain unusual amounts of copper and lithium. Species unknown._

The hand carefully reached out and wiggled its fingers. The voice mumbled some words in an archaic tongue. The infrared beam which surrounded the casing deactivated and the pressure-sensor burnt out. The hand scampered out of view and retrieved a glass cutter, with which it made a perfectly round 6inch diameter incision. It then lifted and carelessly punched straight through the glass, cutting itself badly in the process. The voice laughed.

"Freeze!" Robin yelled. The figure fiddled idly with the skull, then put it back in what was left of its case. He slowly turned around to face the boy wonder.

The man before them couldn't have been more than 25, but already his hair was bone-white. He must have been seven feet tall, but was diminished by his hunched posture. His arms and legs were gunshafts of sinew, gaunt but powerful. His face was split by a grin that was constantly trying to extend beyond the boundaries of his mouth, exposing his row of surprisingly clean and healthy teeth and terminating in bleeding cracks at either side. His eyelids were stretched wide open, and the pinhole pupils within were constantly sliding, pointing anywhere but in the same direction.

"Hands up!" Robin ordered. The man raised his hands into the air. He then flicked his left hand as if swatting a fly, and a sharp curving whip of cold air knocked back the titan like a nine-pin. "Freeze," he replied.

_He must have some kind of ice powers,_ Robin thought. As soon as he got to his feet he flung a pyrotechnic batarang, which the man dodged. The man wiggled his fingers, and Robin was seared by a sheath of golden fire. _Alright then, temperature manipulation powers._ Robin thought. He flung several standard birdarangs at the sinister man, who flailed his arms yelling "Transaive!" and the birdarangs paused in their course, then began fluttering about in random directions. Robin stared in disbelief as the small cluster of birds that was once his ammunition flitted off towards the Egyptian wing of the museum.

"Who…**what** are you?!" he yelled in frustration. The man looked at him straight in the eye, and the insane grin threatened to split his head in two.

"I am the Mad Antimarion. I am a wizard of great power. I bear the mark of Slath, and I have at my disposal the reagents to cast the most blasphemous curse in all of grammary!" His eyes spun round so violently in his head that a stream of tears coursed forth. His entire body convulsed in throws of violent laughter but no sound escaped.

_He's a stark raving loony,_ Robin thought. He flipped open the com link.

"Titans, GO!"

"24 seconds till he calls us for help! You owe me twenty bucks!" said Beast Boy to Cyborg."


	2. Chapter 2

The medieval armor suit opened the exhibit from the inside, then removed its helmet to reveal Cyborg's mildly reflective cranium. Terra leapt out from behind a human skeleton display and cart-wheeled over to face the foe. Starfire swooped in from the solar system exhibit. A green flea leapt from Robin's hair and transformed into a young spandex-wearing teenager. Robin rolled the words on his mouth, drew breath, and then repeated the words. "Titans, go."

Starfire flew forward, gathering light energy into her eyes and hands, while extending her arms and legs into a standard Tameranian fighting stance. Cyborg barreled forward, Terra floated forth on a large chunk of slate, and Beast Boy charged ahead as a full-grown rhinoceros. Robin extended his pole and lunged forward.

The man waved his arm, then shouted "BANISHING OF YELDMAR!" A radius of blue energy erupted from the man, within it faint ultraviolet images in shapes human and less than human sprung at them. The titans were battered back and knocked to the ground. Cyborg retaliated with a foot-blast, but the wily wizard sidestepped the blow as if he expected it.

"Hap gam! Yar sonnig!" he retorted, then snickered as if he had made a particularly witty remark. Robin was the first up, hurling a smoke bomb. When the haze cleared, Beast Boy, and Starfire were gone. The sinister sorcerer found himself facing Cyborg's fist. "Gurlgmaz reduction!" the man shouted. Cyborg stumbled and found himself looking up at the towering magus. The mechanical man was now four feet high.

Antimarion summoned a silver battle hammer to his hand and knocked Cyborg into a corner disdainfully. He plucked a hair from his head and muttered "entalgesco, Faerie rope!" A hair-thin thread shot out and wrapped around Robin. As it closed about him, he knew it was unbreakable. He let his arms go limp, not even bothering to struggle against the narrow bonds. Antimarion wound the thread, slowly dragging the boy wonder closer. "Hey!" Terra yelled.

"Over here mop head!" Beast Boy called.

"Unhand my friend!" Starfire cried. The wizard turned to face the three of them. "Miasmersense!" he yelled wiggling his fingers. A crackle of purple light exploded in a circle, passing through Starfire, Terra, and Beast Boy at the upper end of the visible spectrum. A wave of maddening mental white noise surged through them, dashing reason like crabs on a cliff face. Beast Boy exploded into a fit of gibbering and lolling, while Terra began punching herself in the face. Starfire buzzed and chattered, breaking free of the enchantment. She flew at the wizard and snapped the thread binding Robin with two fingers. She swung a chitin-reinforced fist at the man, shoving him down and breaking his nose.

"Idiot courtesan! You shall die HORRIBLY! Aracranious!" Starfire staggered back. She was ensheathed in a web of violet darkness, and her head seemed to bulge and ripple as if in a heat shimmer. She felt tiny bugs were crawling all over her, though she could see none, and her skull ached as if it would burst.

Beast Boy wandered aimlessly. Terra ceased punching herself and leapt forward, taking a bite of Beast Boy. The wizard muttered another incantation, and he swirled like a whirlwind over to the paleontology exhibit, Starfire and Robin dashing after him, while a fun-sized Cyborg struggled to get up, weighed down by a fallen statue. He was pinned at just such an angle that he couldn't fire his sonic cannon or foot blast at it.

Just as Beast Boy had begun striking back, banging his head against Terra's with stubborn anger, the magic upon them faded. "Whoa…crap, I got mind-toyed again," Beast Boy said. "Stupid magic." Terra was still gnawing on his arm.

"Whath? Oh, righth, ma-ick." She stopped chewing and wiped her mouth, looking a little sheepish. Beast Boy looked in the direction where Robin and Starfire had headed, then turned into a cheetah and dashed off. Terra strode briskly after him, bringing up the rear.

A plaintive cry escaped Cyborg's mouth. "Hey? Guys? Some help here? I can't get up."

"Beast Boy?"

"Robin?"

"Starfire"

"…anybody?"

Starfire unleashed at the menacing magus a volley of starbolts and eye blasts, but all of them missed. The shadowy web had substance, and the hampered movement made it very difficult to aim. Robin was trying to figure out some kind of weapon that would get through to the inventive spellslinger. Before he could act, the man jumped up on the _Albertasaurus_ skeleton exhibit and put his hand on it. "Vita…mortis…dominarus…animate dead!" A dark energy gathered in his fingertips, then entered the thigh bone he was touching. Bit by bit, it soaked through the skeleton, until every bone gave off a shimmering darkness. There was a loud cracking noise, and then…

…nothing happened. Incredulous, the Mad Antimarion repeated the incantation, twice, three, no, four times, but to no avail. Beast Boy snickered at the scene. As something of an animal and prehistory buff, he knew that the skeletons displayed in museums are not the actual bones but mold-cast copies composed of metal or plaster, which having never been alive cannot be reanimated. After thinking this he barreled down after the magician as a living example of dinosaur species whose reconstructed skeleton was before him. The magician waved a hand and yelled frantically, then pointed at a shaft of moonlight. The light from the window turned from a soft white to a harsh, green, glare. Beast boy found himself painfully wrenched, the shape of the Mesozoic therapod melting away as the magic forced him into his true form. Before he could take further action, the magician waved his hands and a beautiful pattern of colored lights appeared on the floor, and Beast Boy was gripped in the all too familiar stupor of hypnotic trance. Antimarion grabbed him, waved an arm shouting "Venikira, venikira, venikira!" and the skull, golden statue, and what appeared to be a mouse fetus in a jar of fluid appeared in his hands. As the mesmerized beast boy gazed placidly down, the man muttered an unholy incantation, the young hero gripped firmly in one hand, the objects in the other. The skull flickered with the memory of life, the statuette gleamed with the suggestion of it, and the fetus stirred in its fluid as if still hoping to emerge alive and well into the world. Robin was distracted from the morbidly fascinating sight by Starfire's moan of pain. It wasn't just a trick of the light, her head really _was_ bulging and throbbing like an iron lung. He grabbed her and started to run, his only thought to get her out of harm's way. She suddenly flailed out in a spasm of pain, her superhuman strength cracking one of Robin's ribs and sending him sprawling, dislodging the burden. She gave on last scream, so high that rather than hearing it, Robin with his human ears could only see glass shatter and feel the stinging vibration. She passed out, and then her head exploded.


	3. Chapter 3

Well, at least the back of it exploded. Fragments of bone-like tissue and chitinous coating had flown everywhere, though nothing similar to brain could be seen. The face was still horribly intact, twisted into a look of agony that would make Sylvia Plath faint. Worse yet, it exploded from something coming out of it. Scattered in the general vicinity were three massive spiders, coated with blood and Tameranian body fluids for which xenobiologists have yet to find a name. They could not have possibly fit inside the meager skull, each one had a bloated abdomen more than two feet in diameter, rising a total of 4 feet high and 7 feet wide. Robin, Terra, and Cyborg each had seen them burst from her head right before there eyes. Before they had time to even consciously register what they saw, almost mercifully, the torrent of battle washed away any thought, as the newly born spiders lunged forth, one to each titan.

Cyborg was actually helped. The spider's futile biting succeeded only in pushing aside the statue. He then knocked it back with a foot cannon, rose to his full 48 inches of height and finished off the arachnid with a blast from his sonic cannon. Robin was bitten twice, but managed to drive the creature off by combining a flash pack with a close-quarters pyrotechnic charge. Still functioning on battle fury autopilot, the former sidekick saw his opponent distracted, and took the opening.

Just as his lips closed on the words, a powerful current entering Beast Boy, a birdarang gouged the wizard Antimarion in his hand. The skull, statue, and fetus all dissolved in a flash of light, and the magus howled. He turned on Robin, and a miniature silver-white orb appeared in front of him. With all the conviction, the horrible surety of a man who really meant it, he said "Curse you." The orb flew at Robin, sinking into his hest, crackling currents of blue and gold through the boy wonder's body as he screamed.

Robin crumpled. Terra lay on the ground, paralyzed from the spider venom. Cyborg fired one last blast to slay the final eight-legged combatant, using up the last of his reserves in the process. Blood still gushed from the small cavern that had once been Starfire's cranium. The Mad Antimarion surveyed his triumph, the motionless figures around him, and a demented grin covered his face. He skipped about, giggling the very sound that was so adorable in a small girl and so utterly grotesque in a grown man, dipping his fingers into the various pools of body fluids and tasting them or splashing them in his eyes. He was so caught up in his deranged reveling that he completely failed to notice the night watchman who shot him in the chest.


	4. Chapter 4

"Robin?" _Robin? What's a Robin? Head spinny. Go back to sleep._

"Robin? Robin please wake up!" This sentiment was repeated by a variety of voices. The noise made the head hurt worse, and what was it, this place in the middle, ah, chest, that hurt too. Hurt like a bitch. Might as well open eyes, then the voices might be quieter.

As his eyes opened, the various blurs of silver-blue, yellow, and green resolved themselves into people. Recognition jolted him back, restoring memory of the recent events. Starfire's head exploding- "STARFIRE! Is she…Starfire! What-"

"Starfire's fine," Beast Boy said.

"I want to see Starfire now!" he said angrily, banging his hands like a wailing infant. He was still more than a little groggy from the spell and the new tarantula venom-based pain killer.

"Hello Robin, are you well? " Starfire had come in, wearing a large, cumbersome-looking hat.

"Starfire! You're okay!"

"That's what I said dude," Beast Boy said a little sullenly.

"New haircut?" Robin asked, noticing that her bright orange locks where invisible from here.

"Well, it was during the battle," she said sheepishly, and then removed the hat. Behind and above her face their was an empty gap, a curved area of raw, pumkin-colored sinew where here cranium had been blown out. Robin stared for a few moments, then screamed. "AAAAH! AAAAAAAH! AAAAAAHHH! OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD! AAAHHH! HOLY GREMPLORK! AAAAAAAAAAAA-mph" he said as Starfire clamped her hand on his mouth.

"Please friend Robin, do not distress." A burly nurse named Olga came in. With a sadistic grin, she drove a syringe into his arm, and he knew no more.

"Uuggh," Robin said. His head swirled for a while.

"Easy Robin, be calm." Starfire was wearing a ten-gallon hat now. "Allow me to explain."

"Bluh?" he said, still a little numb in the mouth from the pain-killers.

"Tameranians have no central nervous system. Our head is mainly a center for vision and biting, combined with a vestigial telepathic lobe. Our brain structure is a highly developed nerve stem spread throughout the body. The same is done with our circulatory system. As a result, a Tameranian can be hit in the head hard or even decapitated with minor damage, and the member regrows within a few days."

Robin took nearly half an hour to assimilate this information in his befuddled state. This source of distress resolved, he turned to frown at Cyborg. "You're not tiny any more."

"I got better," he said in a weak mock British accent. After a short pause,

"Really, I did. The spell just wore off after a few hours."

"That's good to hear," Robin said. "What happened to the Mad Antimarion?"

"You won't believe this," Beast Boy said, "But some rent-a-cop shot him and he passed out from blood loss! He's still alive and stable, but he shouldn't be casting any more spells for a long time. The police were actually smart enough to tie up his hands and fingers and duct tape his mouth shut. I dunno how they're going to interrogate him though."

"That's good to hear…I think," Robin replied.

Olga came back in and, without preamble or explanation, impaled Robin's arm with a dagger-like syringe.  
"When will I be released?" Robin said, frowning with displeasure but maintaining the self-control not to cry out.

"Doctor has already checked you out. You is free to go."


	5. Chapter 5

Back home at the Tower, Terra frowned thoughtfully as she headed into her room. The trip home from the hospital had been pretty fun, especially when they road the ducks that had been altered by an overdose of bovine growth hormone. As she slide from her loose T-shirt and comfortable pants, she critically examined herself in the mirror, turning around and making that thoughtful frown people always make when examining their own ass.

She was different. Though still far from overweight, her body was no longer so flimsy and jagged. Sunken places and narrow bones were now padded and filled out with flesh. She had a full anatomy, complete with requisite hips, bust, butt, and an ever-so-slightly curving stomach. Even her super-human anime-like high metabolism had eventually given way to the pressure of her continual voracious eating habits. She frowned again. Should she worry? Maybe she should cut back a little before her weight got out of control. Perhaps she didn't need to have an entire car for lunch, or at least try to stick to smaller models like Beetles and European cars instead of SUVs and Hummers. She paused, as her brain was wrapped in a thin chord of concern, then smiled the broad grin of bliss as the familiar wave of inner monologue washed away the protests and worries of her superego, that voice that just takes ones precautions and considerations and answers "Naaaah, forget about it."

She could stop whenever she wanted, and she had been a bit on the skinny side anyway. It might be nice to not worry about slipping down storm drains anymore, or apply first aid to Beast Boy from the puncture wounds that her embraces gave him, or get carried off by a strong breeze.

It had been a long time since Terra had contradicted that voice.

Robin relaxed into the familiar yielding depression of the teen titan couch and let out a long sigh. The day had been hard. He couldn't help but be reminded of how much Raven contributed. She could have probably countered half the spells that mad-man cast, and then broken the other ones before anybody came to harm. If anybody other than Starfire had been hit by that spider-head curse...

No, he would not think of such things. He forced himself to breath slowly, and then took a long, slow sip of warm milk with vanilla extract. He had turned on all the automatic security alarms, read Starfire a bedtime story, and hit Beast Boy repeatedly on the head. Although he could not remember exactly why he did this last task, he was pretty sure there was a good reason. Now wasn't the time to think and worry about things anyway. It had been a long while since he had gotten a full 10 hours of sleep. Tonight he could look forward to a restful, uneventful, moonlit night.


	6. Chapter 6

A ray of sunlight slowly crept across the stained shag carpeting. It inched its way past what had once been pizza but was now consumed by a fungal colony that had recently developed a rudimentary system of representative government. The sunbeam proceeded past soiled undergarments, and hiked its way up a moon and stars bed sheet. It rolled around the rim of a black eye mask, trickled up, and made a six-point dive through the eyeholes, penetrating straight to the subject's retina. Robin woke up.

Robin blinked stupidly, frowning from the effort of sorting out the events of the previous night from the resulting dreams. It wasn't easy. Both versions involved what seemed like magic, incomprehensible babble, and Starfire's head exploding and horrible things crawling out. Somehow these ponderings brought him to question the current time. He turned and stared at the clock, which displayed the number 12:00. The number vanished and then returned. He continued staring at it until it dawned on his sleep-encumbered mind that it was not going to change anytime soon. He crawled out of bed and stretched, did a few morning exercises, and set out to investigate the cause of this power failure. In a short bit of time he discovered that the power chord in question had been chewed by some animal. As Robin took the time to survey the area more closely, he noticed there were many signs of habitation by some large creature. Yellow hairs were scattered about. Several unidentifiable bodily fluids stained parts of the floor and furniture. Other objects were badly gnawed or clawed. There were also some strange burn marks that may or may not have been related. As he left his room, he noticed there were similar signs of damage across the hall, including one completely chewed through power chord swinging loose and releasing balls of sparks the size of grapefruits. Clearly this was something that he should bring to the attention of the other Titans.

But first he should make breakfast.

When Robin entered the kitchen he was met with Starfire, wearing a baseball cap and a turban. She was stir-frying something that looked uncomfortably similar to human hands, cheerily humming a tune that occasionally skipped into octaves pitched above the range of human hearing. "Good afternoon Robin," she said happily.

"Afternoon? What time is it?"

"About the threes," Starfire replied. "I apologize for not waking you, but you looked so peaceful there."

Robin gave a little sigh and strode purposefully towards the refrigerator.

"Oh, Robin? I have prepared a breakfast for you."

Robin froze. His mouth slowly sagged and twisted into an imitation of a tilde. His pupils and irises shrunk until they were reduced to small white circles. Working with muscles made rigid by fear, he slowly twisted around his head and forced his mouth into a synthetic smile.

"Oh…thank you Starfire. That's…very thoughtful."

Robin swallowed, wondering what sort of culinary nightmare his naïve alien girlfriend had prepared for him. Were those fried hand things proposed as the first meal of the day, or did some even greater horror await him? As he sat down at the table, he drew breath, savoring the taste of air with the knowledge that it may be his last, and Starfire presented him with-

A plate of scrambled eggs.

They were good scrambled eggs too. Not too runny, not to thick, and just the right amount of milk mixed in. After the potential dreads he had been expecting, this was a slice of nirvana. He looked up at Starfire, eyes watering, with a truly sincere smile of utmost gratitude on his face. He proceeded to dig in.

Robin should have liked it, but he felt something was missing. He dove into the fridge and pulled out a bottle of condiment.

"Robin, is the meal not to your liking?" Starfire asked with concern.

"No!" he said quickly. "It's great! It just needs a little seasoning…"

Beast Boy was the next to wake up. On his way in he noticed Robin noisily slurping down a thick red mass. "Hey Robin, want some eggs with your ketchup! Ah ha ha ha ha haaah!" He reached into the refrigerator for the ingredients to make his traditional breakfast of Morningstar farms breakfast strips, egg-substitute, and of course tofu. What he found there made him gasp and turn away.

"Robin! Why didn't you get any tofu the last time you went grocery shopping?" he half-whined, half-yelled.

"I did, it's right behind the milk."

"This isn't tofu, its hufu!" Beast Boy shouted.

"Alright, different brand name, so what?" Robin Lambasted.

"It's not just a brand name. Hufu is tofu textured and flavored to resemble human flesh!" Beast Boy said.

"Stop exaggerating Beast Boy," Robin said with tired exasperation.

"See for yourself," he said, tossing the package to Robin.

Robin read over and his face was contorted with disgust and horror. He flung the disturbing package from him and put his dish of ketchup into the sink, his appetite lost. "Hey Starfire, did you hear anything during the night?" Robin asked.

"What do you mean Robin?"

"Well, when I woke up half the power chords in the tower were chewed through, and there were some strange droppings and sheds about. I think there's some kind of creature in the tower."

"I would think that Cyborg's security systems should detect such a problem."

"I'll go talk to him about it now," Robin said, and briskly strode off with Starfire floating behind. Beast Boy simply grabbed a few pop tarts and headed out to visit the nearby health food store.

Terra, finally awoken by a fly lodging itself in her respiratory system, loped into the room squinting and groping about hungrily. "Hmm…tofu? Hofu? Tufu?" She said, squinting at the label on the grisly package. "Ahh, it's all the same anyway." She proceeded to rip it open and devour its contents with a single gulp, pausing only to lick her lips and fingers. "Man, this stuff is delicious!"

"What do you mean 'nothing got in'?!" Robin asked incredulously.

"Just that. The security monitor says that, while there was some electrical damage, nothing entered the tower during the night," Cyborg replied defensively.

"Well, maybe it just got in under the proverbial radar?" Robin suggested testily.

"Dude, if a flea lets rip over the air vent, I know it."

"Well, are you-"

"BOOWEE! BOOWEE! BOOWEE!" the titan alarm interrupted, sending them both off and comfortably aborting the conflict.


	7. Chapter 7

"I wasn't asssssking you, assssshole!", the girl hissed at Steve Grenswalden. Steve was a clerk at Non-Human Companion Adoption Emporium, which was formerly called "PetShop", the name having been changed after receiving several bomb threats from PETA interspersed with deranged ramblings about the squirrel king which had been scrawled on their customer feedback forms in crayon. Steve wasn't sure exactly where he had gone wrong. Maybe he should have opted to take a more practical major in college than English, or maybe he should have finished that fourth year. He had been unable to get any of his work published, and when asked the publishers told him that his last name was "too long and German", and then proceeded to laugh and throw things at him. Maybe he had just dreamed that last part. In any case, he found that most businesses wanted somebody "experienced", either that or somebody with different credentials. He discovered that truly there were few depths that the unemployed would not sink to.

Eventually he found himself here, selling exotic pets that would begin succumbing to terminal illnesses while you were looking at them, psychotic birds, hyperactive dogs and cats, gerbils and hamsters that he could have sworn were plotting some sort of diabolical evil and one old and drowsy animal so lost in unkempt hair and sinking jowls and wrinkles that a trained veterinarian could not determine whether it was a dog, a cat, or a ferret. He had been given quite a hard day by the cell-phone using thirty-something woman and her three hyperactive children, and by the 70 year old man who kept ranting about modern music and television and finally bought a single tin of cat food before tottering out.

Then this girl came in. She was wearing a large raincoat, her face and hands concealed in its shadow and folds. What started the argument he couldn't remember. Maybe it was that annoying way she hissed all her sibilants, or her insistence that he provide the fattest feed rabbits and mice, or complaining that there were no snake vitamin pellets, only _frog and reptile_ vitamin pellets, which were altogether insufficient diet supplements. Whatever it was, he regretted having said what he did. He regretted coming into work that day. He regretted getting this job. He regretted moving to jump city. He regretted growing past 12 years old. He regretted ever letting himself be pushed out of his mother's womb.

The raincoat had fallen back to reveal the girl, lightly clad in an oversized T-shirt and roomy comfortable sweatpants. Her skin was green and smooth, with a reflective luster equal to that of snake scales. Her eyes were a golden yellow, slit by pupils like black gashes. Her dark green hair was pulled into a loose braid that drooped over her left shoulder, and she showed her long sharp fangs as her tongue flickered in and out. Her mouth opened wider, stretching vertically and horizontally to an impossible size. He was entranced by the surreal horror. The great pink wet chasm opened and rush at him as he fell in. The monstrous mouth closed on him halfway down, his legs still sticking out, waving in confused circular slow-motion kicks.

"Spit him out, you don't know where he's been," Robin called.

"Mah heem gihamn?" the girl said, muffled by her oral captive. "You heard me," Robin said as he drew a birdarang in one hand and his pole in the other. Reluctantly she spewed out Steve in a dazed and shaking heap. She slowly backed up against the wall, crouched, and then sprung at Robin.

"Titans, go!"


	8. Chapter 8

**Robin expertly leapt aside, bringing the pole down on the girl's back. She yelped with pain and fell to the ground. "MY SSSSSPINE!" She squealed. Robin paused, taken aback. "My ssspine! It's…it's…" Starfire bent over the girl.****  
****"PERFECTLY ALRIGHT!" she said, lunging at her. Starfire was caught by surprise, and as the jaws clamped over her head, a fang pressed against the sensitive tissue where her cranium was regrowing. The adolescent alien shrieked and shook violently, sending the girl sprawling into the wall. She got up quickly, but no sooner was she on her feet than Cyborg rammed into her, wrapping her in a bear hug and bringing her to the ground in one tide of irresistible force. She struggled futilely against his iron grip, but to no avail. Then the girl in his arms disappeared. He got up just in time to see a small green snake slither into a small hole in the wall.******

**"Shit!" Robin said aloud. "We've lost her."****  
****Beast Boy waved his hand "Oo! Oo! I have an idea."****  
****Robin gave him an "I doubt that highly" look, but motioned for him to continue.****  
****Beast Boy bent over and whispered something in his ear.****  
****"Yes, I suppose that would work." Robin said. "Give it a try."******

**Beast Boy flew into the back room. He came back covered in some brown sticky substance. He had a large sprig of green leafy plant pinned to his spandex, and he was wearing a toasted bun on his head with a toothpick and an olive on it. "What's that brown stuff on you?" Cyborg asked, not sure that he wanted to know the answer. Beast Boy rolled his eyes and exclaimed "It's barbeque sauce, duh!" He then grabbed an apple. "Cyborg, gimme some tango music." Cyborg stared blankly. "Hurry, before she gets away!" Cyborg turned and looked at Robin, who nodded vigorously. Cyborg shrugged, pressed a sequence of buttons on his arms, and tango music began rolling out of his built-in speaker system. He stuck the apple in his mouth and began strutting about passionately, twirling an imaginary partner. He lept and then allowed himself to fall as if wounded. He rolled back and forth, idly kicked his legs in the air, stretched and yawned, and pulled at his spandex. Slowly, the green serpent emerged, waving back and forth, eyes glazed over with hypnotic fixation. The serpent rose and shifted. Its body widened and grew to 6 feet in length. Arms sprouted from its sides. Clothes emerged as if out of water from the skin, hair came rushing down, the head shaped to that of a human, and at last the tail split into a pair of legs. She swirled about him, an involuntary dance partner, spiraling, looping, swaying to the music and following Beast Boys lead. As the song drew to a close, she bent over and pressed lips to him. She widened her mouth, stretching it, her fangs extended as the top third of Beast Boy disappeared down her elastic gullet. Three quick swallows, and before anybody had time to react, Beast Boy was gone from sight, and the girl smiled contently, rubbing her swollen stomach and giving off occasional deep, loud belches. ******

**Starfire launched a couple of Starbolts, Cyborg began charging his sonic cannon, and Terra aimed a rock. Terra's face stretched so violently it looked as if would rip, torn between the jealousy of girl on the Atkins diet watching somebody eat ice cream in a waffle cone and the territorial rage of an elephant seal in heat. Robin put himself in the line of fire to stop them.****  
****"But, friend Beast Boy is-"****  
****"We've got a plan," Robin said. "Don't worry."******

**The girl had barely dodged their assaults due to her encumberment. For such a small boy, he sure weighed her down a lot. Her stomach seemed to grow with every awkward step she took. No, wait, it was growing bigger. She just sat down and put both hands on her belly, enjoying the rare sensation of fullness. Beast Boy's 400 pound gorilla form wouldn't let her rise even if she had reason to get up. But he didn't stop there. Her stomach bulged violently as he turned into a large horse. When he became a water buffalo, she felt the first stomach-ache she'd experienced in years. She groaned in discomfort and mounting pain. Still he progressed. When he turned into a rhinoceros, she saw little streaks of red cracking across her stomach. Elastic though her digestive track was, it had its limits. The blood vessels were popping, skin was beginning to tear and tighten. To full to even scream, she let out a long pathetic whine of pain. Robin spoke. ******

**"Our friend here can turn into much larger animals. Would you like too see how you do with an elephant growing inside you? Or a tyrannosaurus maybe?" ******

**"No!" She whimpered. "Pleassse, I ssssurender. I don't want to explode!" ****  
****She ended in a series of desperate little gagging noises, as if her body was struggling to reject this burden before it destroyed her.******

**When the jump city police wagon came, Beast Boy climbed out, making note to shower as soon as he got home. The girl lay on the ground, tired, bruised, and deflated-looking, and gazed passively as she was loaded into what resembled an enormous glass jar with holes poked in the lid, containing in it a large stick and a few leaves.**

**The girl awoke to the sound of somebody wrapping on the glass that surrounded her. Startled and annoyed, she instinctively lunged at the source and as a result banged her teeth against 2 inches of bullet-proof glass. She yelped in pain and surprise and coiled up, rubbing her hurt teeth and sniffling. ****  
****She looked up through the glass to see some guards laughing at her, and immediately returned to nursing her fangs.****  
****How had she gotten into this situation? What had she done wrong? Well, that was pretty obvious. Trying to eat somebody over an argument is frowned upon even in the most open-minded cultures. She just got so angry, and she was so hungry.******

**Ah well. She had suffered the consequences of her action, and she might as well make the best of things. She got up to take stock of her surroundings. She was in a room about 10ft wide and 15ft long. The floor was mostly covered in a layer of green artificial sand. One section had cardboard box with bedding under it, another had minimal washing and toiletry facilities. There was also a large fake seashell, and a 3ft long stick with a few leaves on it. The top had a wire mesh for ventilation. A small plastic bowl contained water. ******

**"Well, this is a bit condescending," she thought aloud. "I wonder if they're going to take me out for a walk or hit me with a rolled up newspaper." At that point, she decided that she would try to write a review of Jump City's prison facilities. Given the amount of crime and some of the more unusual criminals, it was bound to be interesting at the least.**


	9. Chapter 9

Robin sighed as he sat down in the couch. Beast Boy had done something of extremely poor taste and offensiveness, so Robin had sent him to bed before it was even dark without supper. Starfire and Terra were engaging in earth-female grooming rituals, and Cyborg was downloading audio clips from Prairie Home Companion.  
That battle with Antimarion was too close for comfort. Doubtless Raven could have countered have the spells the man was compulsive or stupid enough to announce the names of, and could have broken the rest. She could have telekinetically snatched that snake up in an instant. He knew should would return though. She had to come back eventually.  
…right?

*

After some period of lounging about the cell, dozing in the sun lamp, she began to feel boredom set in. She had tried to relieve this by watching the activity of the guards outside, but it largely consisted of them chatting, reading, or briefly looking back at her. Her boredom quickly gave way to hunger, and she wrapped at the glass to try to get the guards' attention. Eventually one of them looked up at her and impatiently pointed to the left. She turned to face a small metal panel with a microphone, a blue button, and a red button that had escaped her attention earlier.

A fast-food drive-thru intercom quality voice crackled out of it. "What is it?" it inquired. The girl pressed the red button, and a small screen lit up saying "Please do not press this button again." She then pressed the blue button and heard a brief shriek of feedback. "When or how do I get some food? I'm hungry."

"Mess hall. One o-clock." The guard said.

The girl looked at the clock. "Well? Can I go now?"

The guard simply smiled. A large clamp dropped down from the ceiling and she was violently yanked away.

**

The serpentine senorita was plopped down in the middle of a spacious but noisy cafeteria. She rose and rubbed her sore butt, stretching as only a being with a blend of human and snake characteristics can. Her highly elastic stomach rumbled impatiently as she got into the lunch line.

To distract herself from the hunger, she began looking around at her inmates. In front of her was a grumbling man who either had some line of insectoid blood in him or was dressed to resemble a moth, she couldn't tell which. A fat, hairy, orange-haired adolescent was heatedly arguing with an irate midget about the respective virtues of one video-game console over another. A country-bumpkin looking figure with a bib that had the initials "B. N." inscribed on it sat down with a bowl of steaming chili. A scrawny black-haired man with an "A" on his shirt bitterly chugged a protein shake and gnawed on a cardboard-like energy bar.

Her observations where interrupted when she was violently shoved to the ground. She looked up at her assailant to see a black-haired muscular man with grey skin and clothes that had been purchased pre-torn. His face had an overconfident sneer hastily plastered on it, as if the person assembling his visage decided to call it a day and hit the bars during some crucial part of the design process.  
"I was in line firssst!" the girl said angrily. The roughly hewn twenty-something responded by giving her a hard kick to the ribs.  
"You're a new arrival aren't you? Listen NOOB, you have to learn your place. I'm JONNY RANCID! And that's a name you'll learn to respect. Now get out of my sight."  
"I don't think ssssssso." She snarled.

"What was that?" Rancid growled. Some of the heads were turning. The a-shirt boy, geek, and short one had already turned to view the spectacle and were starting a chant of "Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!" that spread through the inmates like a dirty rumor.

"Oh, you're in for it now," Jonny Rancid said as his shirt "fell off" and he flexed with attention-loving anticipation. The girl simply rose to her feet and stared at him, leaning side to side in a kind of warm-up dance. Jonny swung a punch at her and she effortlessly dodged aside. She leered at him with pure delight, flicked her tongue, and then chomped down on his head. A series of gasps and shudders ran through the crowd, a long with a few appreciative whistles and cheers. Without missing a beat she bent downward, forcing the delinquent deeper into her gullet, and ended with a satisfying gulp.

The crowd was silent. Then the girl's stomach began to gurgle noisily. She turned yellow, and started coughing. She then bent over and, coughing and choking, violently vomited up her slimey and sore but mostly intact combatant. "Bleeeach! That taste! You really ARE rancid!" she said to him, through dry heaves and spitting. The lookers-on erupted into a chorus of laughter. The girl slowly recovered got back into the line, while Jonny just sat their, not sure whether to feel relieved or insulted.

After getting a healthy meal of red meat, poultry, and what may or may not have been fish the girl chose an empty table at random. Moments later somebody came and sat next to her. It was a girl in a striped outfit with two plumes of purple hair. From the neck down her body was no wider than the serpentine female's arm.  
"Hi there, I'm Jinx. What's your name?"

"Oh, I'm Elizabeth Masters."

"What's you're super villain name?" Jinx asked

"What do you mean?" Elizabeth said with a puzzled frown

"Your alter ego, your code name, your power-persona, your secondary nomenclature. You know what I mean. Jonny Rancid's was named "Percival Chadson" at birth. Superman puts on glasses and insists on people calling him Clark Kent when he's not fighting crime. Diana of the Amazons gets in a one-piece and wears magic bracelettes and goes under the name of 'Wonder Woman.'"

"Some of my friend call me 'Eliza' or 'Lizzy'" she said hesitantly.

"Don't you have a super name, like Lizard Girl, or She-Serpent or something?"

"Why would I do that?" She asked, her face twisted uncomfortable by complete incomprehension. Jinx simply stared and blinked.  
"Anyway, that was pretty cool what you did to Rancid."

"Aw, it was nothing. I just didn't have any lunch, and I was angry, and he was right  
there…" she trailed off, blushing but obviously loving the attention.

A thin blond girl lightly plopped herself and her lunch tray of salad with vinaigrette dressing, diet coke, and french fries in the seat opposite her.

"Oh my gawd, hi there! I saw what you what you did to Rancid, he was such a jerk, he had it coming, you're cool with me. Anyway, I phoned Diana, and I'm all 'Whattup b?" she's all 'Who are you?' and I'm like 'It's Kitten, duh!' and she's like 'How did you get this number?' and I was all"

As the blathering brat continued her monologue, Elizabeth downed her food in two gulps and took out a pencil and paper-pad. There was still a half-hour of lunch left, and she might as well start on her research notes. She stared at the girl loudly gossiping at her, oblivious to any signs of disinterest or boredom. She turned back to Jinx.  
"How do you spell 'Narcissistic'?"


	10. Chapter 10

Robin was running, running fast and hard. He was running across a long nondescript landscape, running towards something. Up ahead he saw them, Starfire, Terra, Beast Boy, Raven, and Cyborg, waving and calling to him. Beast Boy was nailed to a sign with the words "In Memory of Hazel" engraved on it. Something bad was happening. There was a green wireframe landscape, and it kept rotating above them. Everytime it moved Beast Boy groaned in pain and clutched at his abdomen. Robin hurried to free him, but then something happened. As he was working to pull Beast Boy free, he made a face at him, an ugly face, and the puffed cheeks and bulging eyes burst apart. From behind them emerged a cruel face, the chiseled, white-haired, demented face of the Mad Antimarion. It was only his face, and as it jerked loose it floated toward him clumsily, yelling in something like Latin, before it bit him. He tried to shake it loose, he tore it off and threw it, but it only laughed as it rolled across the ground. He saw that the bite mark was glowing yellow. The glow spread through his veins and bones. Robin's hair went yellow, his voice degenerated into an incomprehensible animal squeal, his front teeth grew so faced that the cut throw his jaw. A tail sparked out of his back like an arrow, he felt the heads mocking gaze as his humanity and focus and single-minded determination peeled off like dead skin. He turned the other titans, but they only backed away, pointing at him and talking in some slow backwards voice he could not understand. He tried to shout, "It's not me its him! It's his fault! It's his fault!" but all he could do was repeat the same three shrill syllables over and over. Even as he tried to pass the blame to the antimarion-headed Beast Boy, a spectral image of the same wizard loomed over him. "This is my work! Boy! You boy! And think boy, you don't know the half of it! You've got it second hand! Second hand! You didn't even get the full dose!" After speaking he loomed for a moment, then crossed his eyes and stuck at his tongue at him. Something seemed so inexplicable suprising and horrible about this gesture that he snapped his eyes open and leapt out of bed with a hoarse scream.

*

Over the years, robin had developed more than a few personality quirks. One of his problems was that whenever he found something wrong with himself, some weakness or flaw, he would set about ignoring other, less-pressing issues (such as "sleeping") and put all of his massive willpower into correcting it. Naturally, if he took care of every shortcoming and imperfection in this way, he would be dead within a week, so his subconcious had long ago learned to hide such things. If Robin had a problem that could not easily be corrected without great self-injury, his Id would snatch it and snuff it down in a thick bundle of denial, then cram it into a box in a locked cabinet of a metaphysical basement room with a sign on the front saying "Beware of the Leopard." Unfortunately one circular side-effect of this behavior was that his tendancy to risk life and limb correcting every flaw was in and of itself a flaw that could not be overcome, so he was largely unaware of his obssessive behavior.  
With this in mind, you will perhaps understand why Robin forgot his dream so quickly. The moment he woke up, his subconcious regretted ever having shown it to him. Did it even show it to him? The subterranian animal-mind within Robin scratched its metaphysical head. Sure, it wanted to alert him of something, but it seemed like some outside force had pressed into its ether, some alien element had been implanted into the slipstream of REM. The subconcious shrugged its symbolic shoulders. Either way, its implications were not ones that a driven man like Robin would be able to healthily deal with. Better to keep it all under wraps, and store it in the same locked cabinet of repression as that unusual ketchup craving from the previous morning.

Robin rolled over and looked at the glowing red 4:39 on his clock. He frowned. It was to late to get any real sleep, and he wanted to get some things done. He was just making a light breakfast when the signal sounded. He reflexively turned it off, and then paused. Drawing up the report on his computer, he saw it was only a minor robbery and an unimportant villain. He thought of Starfire resting peacefully, innocent as a newborn, limp as a doll, and emitting octivated whistling snores that made small children wet themselves and flee and caused all dogs in a 2 mile radius to lie flat and whine with fear and agony. He thought of Raven, never eager to be disturbed, and really deserving every moment of calm relief from consciousness. He thought of Cyborg, still not at full power. He thought of Beast Boy, as always curled up into a near fetal position, leg-kicking as he playfully chased dream rabbits. He thought of Terra, spending hours every night shifting around for a comfortable position that didn't have one of her bones poking into some internal organ. It would be better not to wake them. They had all been through a lot. He could definitely handle this on his own. With that thought, Robin left a note on the kitchen counter, hopped on to his motorcycle, and drove off into the waning night to face an enemy alone.

**

A crowd of people in tuxedos pulled back, murmuring in controlled terror. A sign above them read "JUMP DANCE CLUB" crackled with a burst, and a flurry of chitinous legs the sign was rearranged to spell "BAD PUCE JUNC" with the M and the L being tossed carelessly in the general direction of the frightened crowd. A wicked voice rolled out

"AHAHAH HA-HA HAAAH!" This peal of manic laughter was punctuated by a clicking and horrible slurping sound.

"You all remember, don't you?" The speaker paused, and a sticky gob of webbing struck a man, pinning him flat against the wall.

"DON'T YOU?!"

Without waiting for a response, the menace continued his monologue.

"Summer of ninety-nine. I wanted to join, tap-dancing, but you laughed. You wouldn't let me join. An eighty-dollar membership fee, and I was "too young", and "not talented". Well, WHO'S LAUGHING NOW?! Sixteen hundred dollars, the price squared, and look at me now!"

Fang reared up, his human body angled unusually in sort of bow, hanging from the huge spider that clicked menacingly. His human portion began tap-dancing away with a fevered intensity. He was interrupted when two of his chitinous members where frozen solid and shattered. With a howl of pain he turned to face his attacker.

Robin gave a humorless grin and drew out his pole. Fang drew back his pinscirs and growled

"Why it's YOU again!"

Without further preamble, he let fly a large glob of webbing. Robin tossed out a pyrodisc which burst into a mass of thick orange smoke on when it collided with the web. Fang skittered forward to meet his opponent, but the smoke dissolved to reveal nothing. A sharp disc lodged in his abdomen, and he reeled around to face the teenaged hero. Robin waved his cape tauntingly, matador-style, and Fang roared and charged forward. Robin dropped it and whammed Fang on the head with his staff. Fang sunk his pinscirs in with a retaliatory bite. Robin winced and bled, but he appeared to be free of any poison. Little did the arachnocephalic antagonist know that Robin had a specially prepared disc loaded with fluids to neutralize his poison glands. Robin drew back for the critical blow and released a triumphant shout

"You're goi-EEP!"

His voice ended in a shrill crack, and he gasped. The voice that came was a shrill annoying whine of a voice, more like the squeaks of a rodent than human speech. He cleared his throat and tried again, but the same irritating squeal came out. The now calmer crowd began to laugh, and Fang perked up with hearty spider chuckles. Robin, with business-like calm and dignity, eschewed the trash-talk and knocked Fang senseless.

***

Day Nine of my term of imprisonment. The meals here are cold and lifeless as a Minnesotan November. I can say without use of hyperbole that I've eaten dead rats with superior bouquet and nutrition. Despite this, lunch is more or less the high point of my day, providing a rare opportunity for some nourishment and social interaction. Jinx is a valuable asset to my sanity, cheerful but not annoying, playful but not unable to take things seriously. Were it not for her friendship I would probably go psychotic and try to eat my own legs off.  
I spend the time back in my terrarium-like cell dozing, crawling about lazily, sunning myself, and generally achieving previously unimagined states of boredom.

But enough about me…

Today was the first day I was allowed to visit other sections of the prison facility. The design of this place seems a bizarre hybrid of penitentiary, mental ward, and zoo. I checked out the Geriatric Prison and was scowled at by an elderly limey named Mad Mod and briefly entertained by the antics of a washed-up conjurer styling himself as Mumbo Jumbo. The next stop was the People-who-turned-themselves-into-babies, which only contained a single occupant. He had a clock motif on his crib, and a rattle shaped in the likeness of a grandfather clock. Despite being about one year old he already had grown a mustache and bushy eyebrows.  
Possibly the most entertaining SOSC (Single-Occupant-Specialized-Cell) was the isolated server and electrical circuit where they kept a power-hungry computer chip called Overload. An interface screen allowed a visitor to interact with him/it in a chatroom-style format or play two-player Mario brothers, galaga, or balloon fight (there was one more game, but Overload HATES Duck Hunt. Don't ask me why).

There was one new occupant I saw shipped in from the intensive care unit at jump city hospital called Antimarion. There was some concern about what he'd do when he woke up, since he has some kind of weird psychic powers or other ability that the staff has no way to restrain, but he seems to have taken on an unnaturally placid mood. The penitentiary psychologist says he's in a state of extreme dementia, but the guard who brought him in said he was pretty demented when he took out the Teen Titans, so nobody's taking any chances. He's got a constant guard of five well-trained soldiers, two psychics, and a super-soldier of some kind. Mostly he waves his hands around, softly muttering. He does something magic every now and then, but the psychics say it's just harmless divination. When I came to visit, he spoke to me gentle. I leaned a little closer, and he whispered "It is already done. The most horrible curse…it is set. It progresses more, the damage is done. I have no need of violence now." He then pointed one eye straight ahead, crossed the other, bit himself on the arm, and let loose a long and muffled but penetrating scream. It still gives me the willies just thinking about the creepy nutter.

I hear the lunch bell ringing, so I'll wrap up this entry.


	11. Chapter 11

Starfire hummed the theme song happily as the titans drove home. She was eager to get back and see Robin after their two-and-three-fourths-day crime-fighting campaign that circled outer jump city.

For those unfamiliar with the locale, outer jump city was the collection of suburban and rural districts lining the borders of the modest metropolis. Lacking the attention that came with the main city's higher population density, crime had gone their largely unchecked. Its superficial suburbs where the breeding grounds for spoiled brats with the humanitarian kindness of an axe-murderer on heroin. The well-kept lawns were tended by the kind of troubled children who held in their bad emotions until some dangerous chemical or minor incident pushed them over the edge and compelled them to don elaborate costumes and discover new ways to execute vengeance for half-imagined slights. The back-road farming districts of outer jump city were flat, depressing slabs of land so dull and unimpressive that the residents often went on psychotic killing sprees just to relieve the monotony. It was this exterior ring unwatched by super-powered law enforcers that had spawned such infamous criminals as Kitten and Billy Numerous.

The crime-fighting tour had consisted of an intensive weeding out of malevolent personages mixed with public appearances designed to improve moral values. They had captured and deported an illegal chupacabra and arrested the person who smuggled it in from Puerto Rico, who claimed he thought it was a domesticated iguana. They spoke to a middle school class on how bullying could have lasting negative effects, putting emphasis on the fact that psychotic mutants have an almost uncanny ability to recall and locate an individual who gave them swirlies before "the accident". They succeeded in destroying a demonically possessed wheat thresher and then narrowly escaped prosecution by the Department of Agriculture under an obscure regulation involving improper use of farm tools. They gave a "crime doesn't pay" speech that ended with a dramatic demonstration of what Tamaranian jaws could do to the human body (played by a medical cadaver), then returned the rest of it to the medical research center in a small jar. They gave an anti-drugs speech wherein Beast Boy made what he considered a highly amusing aside involving marijuana use and a female body part that resulted in the titans fleeing the high school pursued by faculty members with pitchforks. They fought a deranged half-man half-acorn squash that had teamed up with a were-gopher to pilfer nearby crops and deplete topsoil.

The titans helped out at the local community college giving a series of one-time lessons. Starfire taught the chemistry class how to make a Grunzelficor firework*, Terra brought up a number of specimens for the geology department, Cyborg gave the robotics department a lesson on replacement bionics, and Beast Boy turned into various animals for the zoology department to examine that normally only better-funded universities had access to. At the end of their visit, they all came together for a highly amusing cross-dressing skit about teen pregnancy.

Robin had wanted to come along of course, but the other titans agreed it was high time he took a break. Robin had some objections, but his opinion was swayed when Starfire reminded him how much he overworked and put a collar on him designed to give moderate electric shocks whenever he tried to leave the tower. She smiled eagerly at the thought of him, probably collapsed from fatigue peacefully resting against a computer screen.

Beast Boy just wanted to get home and get into bed. His memories of the nights spent on the road were foggy at best, and both times he had woken up with a strong metallic aftertaste in his mouth surrounded by cans of jolt cola and battery wrappers. If the other titans knew what he did, they must be deliberately letting him stay in blissful ignorance, a condition with which he was quite familiar and comfortable.

Terra also had something of blank spot in her recollections. She had stayed a bit to enjoy in a little "social drinking" with the student body, and woke up naked in a hotel room with a dog collar, $75 in small bills, and a badly gnawed goat skeleton. At the moment, she gave this no thought** Her main concern now was that her seatbelt was unusually tight.

What Cyborg thought is none of your business.

When Starfire flung upon the door to the tower, her serrated jaw dropped as she took in the scene of devastation before her.

*Grunzelficor fireworks are heatless feats of pyrotechnics mastery that soar up to half a mile before splitting into four jets of blue radiance. This particular firework was named after Grunzelvy, a Tameranian folk-hero who had four heads and breathed ice rays.  
** Possibly because that's how she woke up every Saturday morning.


	12. Chapter 12

Ketchup packets and dead batteries were scattered about the floor. Some of the walls were dented with fist impressions. Every yielding surface was marred by congealed red stains attracting flies.

On the table was a note. Its tidy lettering and total absence of wrinkling or staining only served to further emphasis the discordant atmosphere.  
"Training in room.  
-Robin  
PS: Don't disturb me  
PPS: That means you Beast Boy,  
PPPS: For the last time Beast Boy, I don't CARE what about the advanced graphics of Super Monkeys 2K are. You know what? I hate it now. I used to like it but you've completely turned me away from the series. All I can think about when I play it is you yammering away. If you bring ANY Super Monkey cartridge within 10ft of me, I will smash it into small pieces and destroy it in fire.  
PPPPS: Buy more ketchup. We're down to our last seven bottles.

The overall content of the note was comforting enough, but it still wasn't sufficient to dispel the ominous feelings. Robin had a well-earned reputation for ignoring his own problems and pushing on when he should take the back seat*. With this in mind, the all came to an unspoken consent that they should violate his wishes and check up on him.

Starfire tentatively wrapped on Robin's door.  
"Friend Robin? Are you there?"  
There was a pause, and then a squeaky voice snapped "Didn't you readka my note? Go awaychu!"

Starfire gave a respectful, hesitant pause, and then knocked with increasing vigor until she knocked the door down with a particularly enthusiastic wrap on the barrier.

Robin was practicing a rigorous one-handed bo staff excercises, using the other hand to squeeze ketchup directly into his mouth. His clothes were slightly torn and covered in stains, his skin was a lemon-yellow, his cheeks where heavily flushed, and two long, rabbit-like ears protruded from his skull. Thin, neon-yellow stubble was sporadically sprouting from his skin, and there were scratches and scabs dotting his body. He froze when he saw them.

For a brief period everybody stared. "R-Robin? You are not well." Starfire said, beginning with a weak trill but finishing her sentence with an air of maternal finality. Robin wiggled his nose and twitched an ear. He spoke in a clearer, lower voice, carefully articulating and straining on each word.  
"I'm fine Starfire. I'm just…a bit out of shape."  
Beast Boy broke into a spasm of incredulity. "Out of SHAPE?! Dude, you're yellow and you have bunny ears!"  
Robin gave an evasive glance and muttered "just the toxins coming out."  
Cyborg shook his head so hard it rattled. "Just look at yourself man!" He grabbed Robin and forced him against the mirror.  
"And have you been LIVING on ketchup the past two days?!" Terra interrogated rhetorically, waving her hands wildly to indicate the drained packets and empty bottles littering the room.  
"And what have you been doing with these batt-SPIT THAT OUT THIS INSTANT!" Starfire shouted. Just as she asked, she saw that Robin was pensively sucking on a double-A battery. He blinked stupidly for a moment, then spat it out and gave a sullen look.  
"What could have caused this affliction?" Starfire asked. "Is this perhaps some virulent earth disease, yes?"  
"We don't have ANYTHING like this on earth," Beast Boy answered. "Maybe a bite from a miniature giant space ham-" but Beast Boy's fanatical theory was cut short by Cyborg.  
"Didn't that Mad Antimarion do something? That silvery glow-ball thing he shot you with. It must have done something."  
"Or, maybe some kind of…genetic…" Terra trailed off, losing the energy to keep speaking. She felt vaguely ignored and stupid, and shoved a medium-sized wedding cake into her mouth to keep any more quasi-embarrassing remarks from coming out of it.

"Well, what are we going to do about it?" Robin said, more defensively than he had intended to.  
"I could try to do a med-scan and work out an antidote," Cyborg said without much conviction.  
Starfire smiled hopefully. "Perhaps friend Raven-"  
Starfire's optimistic grin sank into resigned frown. She sighed and bowed her head.  
Beast Boy perked up to compensate for Starfire's drop in characteristic cheerfulness. "There must be somebody else in jump city that knows how to undo a curse."  
"Like who, Jinx?" Cyborg asked sarcastically.  
Beast Boy drooped, then grinned manically and jumped into the air. "YES!"

_________________________________________

*After a particularly violent battle with the Hive Five, Robin had brushed aside the observation that one of his kidneys had was several yards away from his body by saying "I've still got one, don't I?"


	13. Chapter 13

"No." Robin said, twitching his ears sulkily.

"Robin, do not attempt to deceive yourself. A mentally-damaged larva could discern that you are not at all well."

"Look at yourself! You've been scrambled by some kind of spell, and you're turning into a ketchup-guzzling, pointy-eared, yellow…squeaky…just what the hell are you even turning into?!" Cyborg asked with confounded frustration.

Robin turned away and punched the wall, emitting a pathetic "Chuuuu".

"A zangarian shocker lizard?" Starfire suggested.

"Some kind of mutant rat?" Terra guessed

Beast Boy struggled furiously, trying to ignite that spark of recognition that kept flitting through his cluttered consciousness. A cross-section of Beast Boys head showed a hamster, running on a wheel with increasing desperation until a tiny light bulb flickered.  
"No…it…Robin, you're a Pikachu!"

Terra, Starfire, and Cyborg all turned to face Beast Boy with their right eyebrow raised so high they floated inches above their heads. Robin gave a snarl, squeezed the bo staff he was holding until it broke, and looked as full of offense and shock as was possible fro somebody with long ears and neon yellow fur.

"Beast Boy, it amazes me that a frail green excuse for a human could possibly contain so much boundless STUPID!" Robin snapped, his point ending with a crackle of static charge. Beast Boy backed up a few steps.

"No, really! Just hear me out."

Somehow Robin managed to wiggle his nose in a way that was cute, threatening, and intimidating all at the same time. The other titans assumed positions of guarded interest.  
Beast Boy instantly donned a Sherlock Holmes outfit and bubble pipe.

"Let us begin with the aberrant behavioral changes. A diet almost entirely composed of catsup and double-A batteries, something that only an electric rodent type creature would feed upon."

Robin glared defensively. "It's…"

During a brief pause of hesitation, Robin's subconscious sucker-punched his waking mind, snatched away the truth, and replaced it with substitute hastily spelled out in crayon.  
"-a new health diet. More electrolytes are goodchu for impikaroving energy."

Beast Boy held up a magnifying glass to him with a tinge of clinical intrigue and gave a knowing smile.  
"And are we to assume that long pointy ears, red cheeks, and yellow fur are also the result of this 'health diet'?"

Robin's ego rose groggily only to go down like a sack of potatoes once more as his id broke a beer bottle over its head.  
"For your information, it is! It's…just the pika toxins coming out."

Beast Boy nodded with the air of a seasoned Irish cop listening to some spraypaint-wielding hooligan explaining that the wall had by already coated with misspelled expletives when he got there.

"That brings me to another point. Your vocal developments. Your speech has taken on a squeaky, high-pitched rodent-like quality and you find yourself compulsively and perhaps subconsciously inserting syllables of the word 'pikachu' into your phrases.

"I'm not pikasaying those syllabchubles."

"There! You just did it!"

"No I didn'tchu!"

"But…how? I mean, Pikachus and pokemon and all that are fiction, made-up, right?" Terra said with an unsure, quavering voice.

"Well…umm…" Beast Boy came to a halt with a deflated look.  
"There are pikachus in Japan, right?" he said hopefully.

Cyborg looked at Beast Boy and shook his head solemnly.

"NOO! My childhood dream is RUINED!"

While Beast Boy shook into a sobbing wreck, Starfire frowned pensively.

"If these 'pikachu' creatures do not in reality exist, it still may be possible to create one through the higher arts of magic. There was a tale of a dreadful six-headed arctic saurian predator 117% the size of your Giganotosaurus known as the Ganus. In the story, it was slain by the great Grunzelvy with the help of the fire vampires, although historical archives and divinations have confirmed that no such beast ever existed.

Twenty-four and seven of our solar years ago, when our sister planet eclipsed the ice star of Horgaldroth, a tyrannical sorcerer threatened to unleash a Ganus upon the city. The rulers of the time took him for a con man or delusion, for delving into the arcane arts can often damage a person's mind. They ignored him, and so he acquired the mystical gems and live hatchlings needed for the ritual. From these components he created the beast of legend that rampaged the city. No living tameranian was swallowed by the beast because so sharp and jagged were its teeth, so powerful its jaws and so many its heads that their bodies where torn into fragments of flesh no larger than my smallest finger. It took twelve of our strongest warrior-mages and three high priestesses to destroy the monster, and half of them died in the attempt with pain in their bodies and fear in their souls."

Starfire took a deep, calming breath.

"Creatures of legend and fantasy are perhaps better left there."

*****

It's only been three days since my incarceration, and the place already seems like a second home. I've gotten to like some of my inmates, and I've gained a powerful desire to murder others. I bet I could scarf that bitch Kitten without a visible stomach bulge and still have room for the cafeteria peach cobbler.  
I've noticed now that everyone who saw the "incident" with Rancid appears to be giving me a lot of space, and most people are actively nice to me, especially when it comes to sharing food. This is good, because if I stayed on the normal slop rations I'd have the long and healthy lifespan of a garter snake sunning itself on an interstate highway.

That brings me to a somewhat personal point. I've got a mixture of snake and human traits. Snakes are reptiles, humans are mammals. Normally, a snake eats one huge thing (depending on its size something like a vole or something like a pig) every month and just slowly digests. Snakes have more elastic digestive tracks and jaws built a different way so that they can swallow large things. All reptiles have very slow metabolisms, so they don't have much energy but they don't need many calories either.  
Mammals, on the other hand, eat a fairly decent amount each day, and use up more energy to generate body heat. They eat smaller portions than the snakes, although they have more different things and eat more often.  
Lastly there's me. For some reason I've got the capacity, appetite, and metabolism of a snake, but the digestion rate and need for frequent food of a human. The short and long of it is that if I didn't have the serpentine gift of wriggling into tight spaces I'd never be able to get on a swimsuit.

But anywho, today a visitor came in (More accurately, a group of visitors). No less than the Teen Titans. A lot of the inmates shouted death threats and suggestive bits of foreshadowing at them as they came in, but only Beast Boy reacted. Robin was wearing a heavy coat and hat, and every inch of skin I could see was bandaged up. He didn't look hurt, but there something weird about him. I wonder what happened?

I felt incredibly awkward when Beast Boy walked by my cage. Honestly, what should I have said to somebody I ate and was defeated by? I hid curled up in my shoebox brown with embarrassment and hoped he wouldn't tap the glass or try to talk to me.

They came back and left in a few minutes. I noticed them heading towards Jinx's cell before they went out of view. I've got to ask her about it at lunch.


	14. Chapter 14

Jinx breathed a sigh of annoyance. One Specialty Guard* member was holding Jinx's hands to her head while another donned her with a mantle. This moderately-ugly cloth smock was not in and of itself of any security value, but it was coated in a series of tiny chains and plastic packets. Attached to these was a field worth of four-leafed clovers, a warren of rabbit feet, and any number of good luck charms and talismans. The overall positive causality radiation of them was enough to completely neutralize Jinx's rays of misfortune. Thusly encumbered, she was lead into the aptly named "interrogation room."

The room was all but the antithesis of the classic white-walled questioning chamber used in action and suspense movies. The light came from amusingly shaped lamps set at regular intervals around the room, and a candelabrum at the center instead of the harsh florescent glare. The seating arrangements had a long table with a comfortable but firm chair on one side and a well-padded booth on the other. The room was curved into an irregular shape, the walls and ceiling done in a mixture of gentle earth tones, while the floor was coated in soft carpeting. Some street signs and Flemish paintings were hung up on the wall, completing the overall sense of being in an old-fashioned restaurant rather than a penitentiary.**

Jinx took slid into the chair and curiously eyed the plate and silverware in front of her. She had just begun to wonder what the extra fork on the right side of the table was for when a small cough drew her attention.

Before her sat Cyborg, Beast Boy, Starfire, Terra, and a heavily bandaged trenchcoated Robin. Beast Boy took a deep breath and distended his face into a puffy, squinty, slightly jowly visage. He then addressed Jinx in his attempt at a godfather voice. "I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse," he said.

Jinx wet her lips before responding. "What would that be? Dinner and a movie?" she asked, with voice and smile inflected and twisted in such a subtle manner that it was impossible for Beast Boy to tell if she was being serious or not. To the right of him Cyborg was unconsciously crumpling a spoon in his hand, his face in a mask of forced calmness. Beast Boy silently prayed for something to interrupt this tense and awkward moment.

"Your waters, sirs and madams," the water set, putting down six glasses of ice water. Beast Boy sighed and started drinking. Starfire picked up the conversation.  
"You see Jinx, we have an unusual 'problem' that perhaps your thaumaturgical skills could, err…"  
Jinx gulped her water. "Cut to the point sparkles. What is it that you want out of me?"

Robin let out a wheezing sigh, then with a swift yank he pulled on the top layer of bandages and the lot of them fell loose to the ground. His ears pricked up, and he shook his head, then glared moodily.

The skinny sorceress giggled, chuckled, and then fell over laughing. She thrashed around in mirth like an underweight perch. Her mouth undulated so wide that at times it seemed to extend beyond the boundaries of her face. Robin patiently fumed until she calmed down. "What the fuck?! Did you get hit by the annoying animated character truck?" she said, still trickling out the last choking drips of laughter. "Seriously, what happened?" Jinx asked again, more serious.

Terra answered "Well, Robin got hit by some kind of magical spell thingy, and now he's turned into an, err, ah…"

"Pikachu." Robin supplied with a bitter squeak.

"Well, what you want from me?" she said with a mixture of defensiveness and confusion.

"Well, you're all magic and stuff," Beast Boy said, "so we figured you might have a spell or something to cure him."

Jinx looked taken aback. She had just opened her mouth to respond when the waiter arrived with their menus.

*The Specialty Guards were an elite force created for the specific purpose of acting as sentinels in Jump City's high security prisons. They were issued with government-paid bulletproof armor complete with breathing filters, infrared vision, stun cannons, a variety of energy beams, and FM radio. Along with that, they each were given a bionic enhancement, usually in the form of an arm-blaster. If that weren't enough, anybody recruited for the position had to possess some form of extreme physical capacity, mild to moderate psychic power, or unusual and practical talent.  
**This was another example of the more unorthodox methods employed by jump city prison facilities. The designers believed that a more relaxed atmosphere would put criminals at ease and make them casually let slip information they would not have given up under the combined threat of thumbscrews, Chinese water torture, and Yoko-Ono albums***.  
***At least, this is the reason that they put on their expense accounts. The fact of the matter is that those white rooms with the glaring lights are boring, and if you're trying to get a mob boss to finger his mutant brother, the last thing you want is to return to the same boring bleached cube of a room every day.

"How," Jinx said, handing the last menu over to the waiter, "would I know what to do about that? I mean, don't you have that short goth for that hocus-pocus stuff?"

"She-chu left," Robin said evasively.

"Anyway, you're a sorceress aren't you? You have magic bad luck power and stuff. You have to have a book of magic somewhere," Beast Boy said.

"Well" Jinx said slowly, "I guess I do, although I don't know when I've actually used it. Normally I just rely on my innate powers and the one or two hexes I know."

"Pleeeeaase?" Beast Boy asked, toddling across the table as a Chihuahua puppy, whimpering slightly. Before Jinx could answer him, the waiter came back.

"Who ordered the soup of the day and house salad with dressing on the side?"

"That'll be me," Terra said. She stared down at it with a grim and resigned expression. Gritting her teeth, she glopped the entire container of ranch dressing onto the mess of salad leaves, parmesan cheese, and croutons, then set about crunching it with grim determination.  
Beast Boy gamboled back to his chair and resumed human form. In what he thought was a quiet voice, he asked "Terra, what's wrong? You usually order the deep-fried beef and pasta combo or something?"  
"Oh," she said, drinking her soup in two half-hearted gulps. "Oh, well, you know. Gotta keep my girlish figure," she said laughing nervously. She punctuated her statement by consuming her entire salad with a few rapid but unenthusiastic forkfuls.

Time froze, and Beast Boy's mind entered an adrenaline-heightened state to respond to the situation at hand. From within the recess of his mind, buried under layers of half-remembered Farscape episodes, lost within labyrinth of video-game Easter eggs, a long-dormant, faint, tiny voice stirred and cried its message with singular insistence and desperation. _"IF A GIRL ASKS YOU IF SHE'S FAT, SAY 'NO'!!!"_ Beast Boy returned from his internal meditation to the conscious present. "Why?"

Terra fidgeted nervously, unhappily licking the bottom of the bowl "Well, you know…I've been putting on some weight."

"Really? I hadn't noticed," Beast Boy said honestly. As much as he loved her, Beast Boy was a guy, and probably would not have noticed if Terra had an extra arm grafted on to her and was on fire.

"You don't think I'm getting too fat?" she asked, squeezing a small patch of pudge.

Beast Boy gave her one of his wide, friendly, easy grins so cheerful open that it suggested he might be under the influence of stimulants. "Naaah. If anything you could stand to put on a few pounds." Terra met his grin with a smile of her own, timed in perfect harmony with a loud stomach-rumbling. "I love you Beast Boy," she said. The two wrapped around each other in a sudden and violent face-sucking embrace, looking like a grasshopper caught in a bowl of angel-hair pasta.  
They were interrupted by Jinx making a pronounced gagging noise and giving them a look that would melt lead. Beast Boy blushed brown* and hid behind his Pad Thai, while Terra turned away sheepishly and hailed a waiter.

"If you're done swapping saliva, I think I could research a spell to solve your sad situation, buuuuut-"

The Titans all leaned in close, their eyes bulging, chibifying in rapt attention and anticipation.  
"-you have to do something for me." She said with a mischievous grin. "Reduced jail time won't cut it. I'm serving enough consecutive years to keep me in prison until people have to worry about the Y10K problem, and I've done enough federal crimes that a local pardon wouldn't be any good. Make me an offer I can't refuse," she said, letting her face melt into a bored-looking pout.

The titans all leaned back, thoughtfully pausing. The little voice in Beast Boy's head scratched itself metaphysically, and what the heck, as long as it was already up it might pitch in.

Jinx heard his suggestion, and her eyes went wide. A thick stream of pink cartoon hearts trickled up from her, and she seemed on the bridge of weeping with elation. She nodded so violently she got whiplash from the two halves of her complex hair formation smacking the sides of her head.

*Because of his unique skin tone, brown was as close to red as beast boy got.

_Jinx is the happiest I've ever seen her. I still wish I knew how she managed to get a year supply of ice cream._


	15. Chapter 15

"Waiting." Robin said despairingly. "I hate waiting. I pika-hate doing nothing, just sitting around-chu while I'm pi-pi-pika-stuck like pi- like _this_" he stammered helplessly, raking his fingers through his yellow fur, his ears twitching as if they were eager to break free of his head and start independent lives.

"Well, we're not doing _nothing_," Cyborg said, carefully painting some Mike Nelson's Ricochet Barbeque Sauce on the six roasted pheasants. He had stuffed them with whole wheat bread crumbs, a sprinkling of paprika, whole cashews, capers, and fresh leeks. He carefully turned them, ensuring that they cooked evenly, watching the sauce and juices pooling in each slick indentation on their tiny bodies. Beast Boy was stirring, flipping, and shuffling with his octopus tentacles, making sure the stir fry was evenly heated, keeping the hot oil bubbling, and mixing the batter. He briefly transformed into a small house fly, scanning the components with his 360 degree vision, ensuring that the oil was pure and the leeks, tofu strips, and shitake mushrooms were turning to a golden-brown. He took a whiff, analyzing the time of all the entrees with superhuman sensory skill, before resuming his cephalopod form.

Robin's heightened olfactory organs alerted him that his omelets were overheating, and he quickly flipped it over. With four fine-tuned flicks of the wrist, he added just enough salt, let it cook for one more minute, and eased it out onto the plate.  
At the same time, Beast Boy shape-shifted into an agile orangutan, and with lightning-reflexes whipped out his stir fry, rolled it in the batter into 25 equal-sized packages, let them cool and harden for 12 seconds, and plopped them into the hot oil.  
Cyborg just finished grilling his pheasants, and speared them each with a tooth-pick mounted lemon wedge and a sprig of parsley.

An egg timer went off. Terra leapt into the air, cape rippling, her eyes squinted shut, and smashed the egg timer with her fist.

"Cooking is done! TIME!"

Terra turned around, speaking in a horrible attempt at a Japanese accent. "For those of you just tuning in, this is TITAN TOWER IRON CHEF! The main ingredient is: reeks and capers, and the method is pan-fry! Gentarmen, present your dishes!"

Terra walked up to Robin. "So Robin, Rhat did you prepare?"

Robin coughed and muttered something about "omelet" in a dispirited tone.

"Very nice. Beast Boy, rhat have you cooked up?"

"Well Terr-I mean, Chairman Kaga, I made a delicious spring-roll stir fry deep-fried," he said, proudly displaying his crispy culinary creations, placed in concentric circles with an onion-blossomed carrot at the center.

"Very nice arrangement." She said, sniffing approvingly.

"And Cyborg, what have you prepared?"

Cyborg beamed. "I grilled some stuffed boneless pheasants, basted with Mike's Bold Ricochet BBQ sauce!"

Terra inhaled deeply.  
"Exerrent! Bode indeed!"

Terra turned around to face Starfire. "Judges, sampo your dishes!"

Starfire blinked, looking to her left and right.

"Psst, Starfire, that's you." She said.

"Oh. Yes." Starfire swooshed forward into one of two chairs next to a table with a cardboard sign saying "Juging Table". Terra whipped off her cape and swung into the other chair. With a decent-sized sampling of each entrée, the two girls carefully scooted their chair forward, tucked in their napkins, and then messily demolished the food before them in a six-second whirlwind. Starfire licked a smattering of sauces off her face, and Terra stifled a burp, then spun off and snapped the cape back on.

"The judges have reached a decision! Cyborg's entrée was the most dericious and savory, with a creative use of the main ingredients."

"BOOYAH!" Cyborg shouted, waiving a turkey baster in a triumphant manner.

"-but, unfortunatry, they are _grilled_. No pan-frying has occurred, and he is therefore disquarified. So, the winner is, Beast Boy!"

"Woohoo!" the green changeling bellowed, dancing about with his spatula in a gyrating motion.

"As agreed beforehand, the rinner gets his entry set as dinner tonight," she lowered her voice to an undertone "and a kiss."

Beast Boy grinned widely, but fidgeted and blushed a little.

"And the rooser's entry goes to feed—Silky!"

The titan's pet giant moth larva squirmed happily. It made Cyborg weep to see the roasted pheasants he had put so much work and preparation into being wantonly consumed by an overgrown invertebrate. Meanwhile, the other titans happily tucked into Beast Boy's deep fried spring roll stir fry with some of Robin's Spanish Omelet on the side.

"I pika-still hafe watching" Robin muttered through a mouthful of ketchup-coated spring roll.

"Do not worry dearest Robin. The Jinx assures us that she will find a remedy within a few days."

"And what am pi-I supposed to pika-do until-chu then?" He asked.

"Just enjoy yourself." Beast Boy said, still shining with the thrill of victory. "Dig in, play some video games, watch the sunset, and yank that pole out of you're a-CHOO!" Beast Boy's head snapped back with a violent sneeze as he reflexively transmogrified into a duck and back again. Rubbing his head and wiping his nose in one fluid motion, he muttered something about turning in early.

Robin lingered at the table alone after Terra headed off to give Beast Boy his prize. Cyborg lumbered off to bed, still chocking back tears.

*****

The Pika-fied boy wonder poked listlessly at his food, stabbing his fork into eggrolls as if they had done him great personal injustices. His thoughts sunk into deeper and deeper brooding, the indignity of it all, the inhumanity, the incredulity, the in-  
"Ow!" He winced as something pinched his side. Ears twitching, hand on his utility belt, he leapt to his feet, anxiously seeking the source of the assault. His eyes only fell on the dimming sky, an extremely satisfied Silkie preparing to vomit on the couch, the stack of filth-encrusted dinnerware in the sink, a brief flicker of orange and green, a pile of old pizza boxes Beast Boy had made into a fort, a half-  
What was that?  
He spun around, attuning his senses to search for the source of movement. He felt another sharp pinch on his left thigh. As he brought his bo staff up for a strike, a hand gentle as a kitten but firm as cold iron clamped over his arm. With a flick of the middle finger, still maintaining the grip, the hand knocked the weapon to the floor and disarmed him. Another hand squeezed his waist, pinching a nerve that made him go limp from the shoulders down, and tenderly lifted him into the air as if he were some fragile construction of tissue paper and balsa wood. He wheeled his head around to examine his assailment, and the shock took his breath away.

******

Starfire kissed Robin lightly on the cheek. "Do you wish to be let down now?" She said with a playful smile.  
"agblh" Robin said, because his brain was busy trying to get his heart beating again. Fortunately Starfire managed to get his drift. She gently set him back on the floor and with a few precise pinching and rubbing movements on his upper back restored function to his limbs.  
When he had recovered from the physical shock, Robin began stammering out a string of sentence fragments. "How-huh-but you…why…when…and the…?"  
Starfire half turned away. All the composed, dangerous manner evaporated as she blushed furiously, scratching at the itchy regrown flesh where her head had exploded earlier and hiding behind her hair.  
"I…err, somebody said they thought I should be 'more aggressive' with you. I am not sure I understood the intent of their words, but I believe this is what they meant. That is, I hope, are you, not offended? I did not sporven to frighten yooglmax" she murmured guiltily, her speech reverting to native Tamaranian in her anxiousness.

Robin opened his mouth to speak, but whatever collection of neurons where responsible for getting words translated into verbal speech appeared to have taken the day off. He reached through his thoughts, trying to figure out just how exactly he did feel about this all, but no clear answer was forthcoming. For lack of proper direction from the central nervous system, his upper body decided to take a brief stint at vigilantism and leaned forward while his lips puckered on pure instinct. As if by unseen stage directions, Starfire's chill burgundy lips met his, and their arms taking a cue from the lips and abdominals neatly completed the embrace.

Eyes closed, the two lovers fully attuned to their supplementary senses. Robin could feel the rough serrated edge of Starfire's outer jaw, tasted the subtle electric tang of her saliva, smell the strong but invigorating citric aroma that wafted off her body, and hear the circulation of air through her quasi-vestigial lungs like waves breaking on a distant shore. Starfire could still taste the hints of egg and carrot fragments caught in his teeth, gently grooming them with the minute cilia on her tongue. Her nostrils flared as she took in the human male pheromones, as familiar and as alien as a close relative seen twenty years later. She combed her fingers through the soft yellow fur, enjoying the small static charges it released into her. Even with her outer lids closed, she could see the waves of heat he was giving off, so far into the uppermost limits of the infrared that it was almost visible to human sight.

Just as they had begun, the lovers released one another and turned to gaze out across the harbor. The distant lights of jump city flickered and waved like a congregation of narcoleptic fireflies, exaggerated and blurred into an undulating globule of brightness on the surface of the lake. In the dark of evening, the incandescent conurbations only rival was the waxing moon.  
Was the waxing moon  
The waxing moon  
Waxing moon  
…moon  
Moon….  
MOON!  
Robin's eyes dilated against his will, soaking up the uncanny satellite with compliant hunger that overrode his horror and revulsion. The moon seemed to fly at him, growing larger and brighter until he was sure he would be crushed or melted by its presence. He could actually feel the ungodly light spiking in through his pupils, shooting across his retinas like poison through veins, bouncing around in his skull with as much vigor as a psychopathic in a straight jacket, and then riding throughout his body on a tidal wave of eldritch power.

Robin felt a violent, stabbing itch as every hair in his body shot up a monstrous half an inch and two identical ones sprouted to join it. A zigzag lightning tail burst from his back like a knife from a wound. He had no sooner moved to clutch the painful growth as his fingernails melted away and out through each fingertip a six-inch javelin erupted. Even as he thought to bite off the claws his mouth reshaped. He felt like somebody was using a belt-sander on his jaw. Two thunders of mind-killing agony ripped into his brain as his two front teeth cascaded into a dark parody of rodent incisors. His clothes ripped into shreds held on only by the mounting static charge as his slender form writhed into a six-foot-seven cannon of ropey muscle. His eyes, white through the mask, vanished into animal blackness with a core of yellow sparks. Then came the power.

It was being struck with a lightning bolt without the relief of unconsciousness or death. It was being resurrected with a defibrillator twice. It was being shocked to death and jolted to life by the same surge of current.  
It was invigorating, unendurable, and painless.

The power flew, arcs of blinding blue entangling his body, and with it he released an ancient howl of pain, elation, and primal terror. The wide windows shattered in a flurry of glinting blue, and the thing that was almost Robin leapt into the harbor below.


	16. Chapter 16

Pete was uncomfortable. Right now he had 220 pounds of girl pressed on top of his own 120 pounds, 30 of which were mascara. Normally, this would not be an uncomfortable position. The girl was pretty cute after all. Her long black hair was like a fountain of midnight. Her smooth silky skin bulged against fishnet stockings, a size-too-small black shirt, and a pair of shorts so tight you could see the platelet cells in her bloodstream.

This would not be an uncomfortable position, where it not for the clammy gravesoil her two-hundred-and-twenty-pounds where pressing him against, the granite gravestone he kept bonking his head against, the algid mist swirling over him, the moonlight and wind-rattled greenry distorting shadows and playing tricks on his eyes.

The most honest part of his brain, the primal core of his subconscious, thought "I'm scared."  
A little higher up, portions of his lobes where recalling memories, drawing together certain neurons to reach the conclusion "This is _exactly_ like a scene in a bad horror movie, near the beginning, where to minor characters have an unpleasant encounter and later turn up splattered across a local landmark."  
Further along the mental ladder to the outside world, he thought "This is creepy. I should have never let her pick a graveyard for a make-out spot. Just five seconds in here has the same effect as twelve consecutive cold showers."  
Another part of his brain reminded him not to be pussy, because really dark people weren't supposed to get creeped out, and that he talked about death and graveyards all the time. The previous part of his brain countered that with the argument that, while he liked discussing the theory of death, he wasn't very eager to move on to the practical application.  
A new part of his brain surfaced, driven by the fact that he really didn't want to look like a wimp and therefore lose face with this pleasantly squishy female on top of him, mowed the other trains of thought down with a psychological AK-47. As a result of all this complex internal debate, he said:  
"It's chilly out here," and shivered a bit to demonstrate.  
The girl nipped him playfully, leaned closer, and suggested a way they could make themselves warmer.

*****

A casual observer would not notice anything remarkable about Pete. A more acute observer, who had seen the episode of Teen Titans entitled "Sisters", might have recognized him as the goth-looking boy who met up with Raven with the line "Everything is pointless. Wanna talk about it?"

What the observer would not know is after that, the conversation dragged. Raven wasn't very talkative, and Pete gradually sunk into silence because no matter what he said Raven looked bored. What Pete didn't realize was that Raven always looked bored. Raven could observe a three-headed llama juggling Siamese triplets on fire with an expression of prosaic apathy.

It wasn't much to talk about, but a person with any understanding of the male psyche will know that from then on he vaunted the fact that he had gone out with a super-hero. By the fourth retelling, he had helped Raven apprehend a twelve-foot long radioactive skink and she slipped off to a fortress of solitude to do reward him with something truly creative involving telekinesis.

It was about this far into my parallel narrative that Pete heard a sound that crystallized his blood.

******

Charity Lovecraft frowned. Her frown was a kind of puzzled frown and a pout, tinged with a hint of jealous hunger. It was the kind of frown that made a supermodel's smile dissolve into envy. It was a frown that made heterosexual men torn between fixing whatever had made her frown or doing something else to make it stay there forever. It was a frown that made heterosexual women look around for an implement with which to wipe it off her face, such as a pair of pruning shears. In short, Charity had a beautiful frown.  
She had developed a beautiful frown because people never hung around long when she smiled.

Charity Lovecraft was not so much pear-shaped as rounded conical. She had wide-angled hips and a curving waist that didn't really bulge out but was broad. Her callipygian figure swelled against her jeans, jutting into the shadows of the nearby elm. Ms. Lovecraft's shirt was torn a bit, and a size too small, holding firm against her diminutive chest, peppered with questionable stains.

Her eyes peered through plastered strands of rubiginous hair at the two teenagers cuddling against each other. Her gaze roamed over the tender exposed flesh, the brow lines, the neck and back vertebrae, calculating every sensitive spot and pressure point. If she was a more cinematic woman, she would be drawing a knife so the moonlight could gleam off it, but she was too cynical and experienced for such romantic notions. Nothing says "flee for your lives" like the sheen of metal and the ring of steel. A trusty bit of twine and a sharpened stick were enough for a craftswoman like her, and anyway she liked working with her hands.

Charity Lovecraft took a deep, cleansing breath to harmonize her energies. She had to be prepared. She couldn't count how many times she'd done this before, but she always knew that if she made a mistake now everything would come apart. The first six would mock her, all those grinning skulls under her bed, laughing at her, and the microwave would give her another lecture and make her eat her favorite shoes. "Better safe than sorry" was her motto.

She had the bag of teeth in her pocket, the familiar textures smooth and cool against her hand. She was wearing the Dukakis mask and fake novelty breasts to hide her identity and frighten evil spirits. She had the pointed stick, the piano wire, and the Bazooka Joe bubble gum to place in the mouths of her victims afterwards. She leaned up against the crypt wall, keeping to the shadows, inching her way silently towards the chubby girl and the goth boy, and

*******

Then she heard the scream. Charity was so surprised she dropped the bubble gum, the stake, the twine, and the f-bomb. The scream might be mor accurately described as a roar. It combined all the feral menace and animal agony of a beast with the complex horror and inner torture of a human. There was a flicker of light through the mist and an angry growl like distant thunder. Another scream came, closer. There was a presence filling the air, something that made metal hum, wool cling, and hair rise.

As she was fleeing, too frightened to look back, Charity reflected on the strangeness of her situation. It was like some B horror movie, only instead of the villain, she had become the attractive female victim. She would definitely have a long argument with her microwave for not warning her about this. She wasn't superstitious or anything. Up until now, she thought you'd have to be crazy to believe in things like ghosts and aliens and werewolves, but she wasn't stubborn enough to ignore something fanged and eldritch up to the point where it chewed her head off. A truthful inner voice told her that whatever made that sound wouldn't be frightened off by a Dukakis mask.

She panted and wheezed as she hauled butt. Maybe this was that "retribution" thing people talked about while they were bleeding to death. Maybe some of those vengeful ravings really had been true curses, and she was going to have her preternatural comeuppance. She wasn't some self-deluded hypocrite who thought she was doing society a favor or an over-zealous loony purging the wicked and the demons. She understood what she did was evil, that's what made it so fun. If it wasn't bad and wrong, it wouldn't make her panties quiver. Knowing that, she wisely ascertained that large patches of instant karma would be things to avoid. She felt a burning sensation rise in her thighs, a tired ache radiating from her bones. She was out of shape. She had to face it; stalking was not a high-energy activity. It would have to be less slow torture and more midnight chases. She felt her own weight pulled by merciless gravity, thudding to jar her knees and back. She might also try to cut back on the human brains, those couldn't be low-calorie, even though they were so delicious and granted her power.

"Oh shit," she gasped between breaths, "it's catching up with me."

********

Pete's head shot up, if only to keep up with the hairs on his neck. Through the particular muffling caused by the pair of panties caught in his mouth, he exclaimed "What the hell?"

Before the echoes had faded the two lubricious teenagers were clutching each other tight for an entirely different reason. Theirs was the passionate and fervent embrace of two people desperately trying to hide behind each other at the same time. The girl seemed to be struggling to use Pete as a decoy for whatever horrors lay in wait while Pete appeared to be actually trying to slide into her mouth and hide somewhere inside her lipid tissue. A loud crackling filled the air, like a big firecracker or a small lightning bolt. The hairs didn't just stand up on them, they waved and wriggle tortured bloodworms. Various fabric nearby floated in the air on non-existent breezes or adhered to them with a death-grip of a static cling. Their was a rising growl very close to them, and the two both froze.

A figure was nearing them in the mist. It ducked, weaved, and lumbered with erratic grace, as if it had more finesse than it knew what to do with. The thing was human-like, but taller, with the suggestions of claws, a rigid zig-zag tail, and what might have been horns. Brief flickers of yellow electric current coursed over it, coating it in a luminous glaze.

*********

The thing sprung from the shadows, landing to crouch literally inches from them. Arcs of power like serpents in their death throes leapt down six-inch claws. Thick yellow fur bristled on a tight, narrow body. Two ears twitched, two incongruously rosy cheeks crackled with a stray discharge of energy that set the nearby elm tree on fire, a snarling mouth pulled back to reveal to long sharp shrew-like teeth. The head tilted right at them, and if either Pete or his girl had been wearing undergarments, they would no longer be clean ones. It took two deep sniffs, a snarl, and uttered a shrill, three-syllable sound as it surveyed them with those storm-globe black eyes. Then it leapt off into the night, and merged with the fog.

Charity was a woman in a scary situation, but she was a killer first and foremost. The killer never trips; vaguely attractive girls without male leads to protect them do. She did however fail to see the van coming straight towards her when she leapt into the street.

**********

There was pain, and a horrible crunching sound. Then she got up and dusted herself off, feeling a swirling sense of relief. She couldn't even feel the hurt anymore, or the cold, or that ache in her lower back. She did seem to be standing in…  
Oh.  
Charity Lovecraft had seen a lot of mutilated corpses in her time, but this one struck a strong chord. It wasn't how bad it was, she'd literally decorated her wall with victims after she finished with them. It wasn't really sympathy either. It was just the chilling familiarity, and that indefinable sense that the body was…

Hers.

"Oh bloody hell." She said aloud.

As if summoned by her words, there was a flicker of light nearby. A cowled figure in white robes stepped forward and beckoned for her to follow. Intrigued, Charity walked on after her. This certainly wasn't what she expected. She had thought she'd meet an underweight gentleman with black robes and a scythe, or some little girl in a bucket, or maybe a horny hot guy with a farming tool and hoofed feet, but not this. If she still had breath, she would have given a sigh of relief. After all, she reasoned, a slender girl in white robes wouldn't be the emissary of hell. Maybe she would get reincarnated as a parasitic fly and subtly lay waste to an African village with larvae and disease-filled bites. Maybe she was going into a private corner of infinity to make her own little world. While she was thinking these thoughts, the landscape about her was rapidly changing. They were going uphill in some road of mist, headed towards a soft grey light. At the top there was a small silver platform.

Charity turned to the robed figure. "So, who are you, and where are you taking me?" For answer, the guide only smiled, a suave, seductive smile with an edge of cynicism. By way of answer, she pulled back her robes to reveal a tanned lithe figure. On it swung a violet skirt of some unknown material, and a purple top set with a green gem. Her hair was black or very dark purple, and her eyes where violet gems. Poking up between this dark rich hair was a pair of softly glowing red horns.

"It's Blackfire. I think you'll fit right in."

Charity Lovecraft's mouth had just formed the "oh" of "oh shit" when the platform gave way beneath them, then fire and brimstone engulfed her.


	17. Chapter 17

**Starfire stared vacantly over the harbor, her empty green gaze reflected in the motes of shattered glass. So many of the equal and original sentience units that made up her mind were occupied with replaying and analyzing the perplexing vision of Robin transforming into some electric rodent man-thing and leaping off into the night. The sense of loss, confusion, horror, shock, and chilling unnwye (a uniquely tameranian emotion which is something like the polar opposite of ennui), took up so many of these mind-motes that she only had the conscious intelligence of two average humans to devote to her immediate course of action.**

*****

**Cyborg's master computer disengaged from his discharge, and entered the activation code. Cyborg groaned, and half-unconsciously overrid it. **

**"It is time to wake up" Cyborg's computer chirped in a pleasant, if frosty, female voice.**

**There was a pause, and then it repeated its message. Cyborg showed no response whatsoever.**

**There was another, longer pause, and then the computer decided to play "Flight of the Valkeries" at decibel levels powerful enough to alter weather patterns for years to come.**

**After extricating his head from the ceiling and getting the remaining organic portion of his heart beating again, Cyborg was fully awake.**

******

**A green kitten-shaped alarm clock in Terra's room beeped out the first few notes of the titan theme song, then buzzed. Terra rolled over and hit the snooze button. A few seconds later, the sound blared out again. As Terra's hand arched towards it, holding the mallet she kept by her bed*, the alarm clock scampered out of reach on skinny robotic legs that Cyborg had once installed for just such an eventuality. As Terra's hand, acting with her ears utterly independent of the small particle of brain lodged in her skull, groped about to try to dash the clock against the nearest available hard surface, the animated time peice scampered over to deliver a mild electric shock to her body. After the same cycle was repeated a few times, Terra reluctantly trickled out of bed to answer the call.**

**Beast Boy lay huddled in a single cover and pillow, clutching a stuffed animal, under his bed, his window boarded up with curtains drawn, his door barricaded.**  
**_**  
***I don't know why she kept a hammer by her bed, and frankly I do not want to know.**  
**_**


	18. Chapter 18

****I**  
**The communication between the three titans had been brief. Robin was not in his right mind. Robin was still there, somewhere, but what had to be done had to be done. Of course they could reach him. Of course they could find a way to subdue him before he did harm to himself or other. Each of them had readied themselves with a silver chain, and they all agreed that, while it was stupid in terms of horror movie tactics, they still had their signals and the only way they could really hope to catch up was by splitting up. Everything would be fine. That's what they all told themselves. **  
**They were so wrapped up, so firmly reminding themselves and each other that they would get Robin contained, and Jinx would come up with a cure, and everything would be okay, that they had gone off into the night for a while before they even realized that Beast Boy hadn't come with them.****

II**  
**"I am faster," said the figure towering over the elderly jewelry-shop owner, as his fingers released the fine powder that had been the silent alarm system.****

"I am stronger."**  
**A red metal fist burst straight through the wall of the safe, and once again the jeweler regretted moving to a city routinely attacked by costumed criminals and more-than human monsters. As if that bizarre magician and then the crazy football players weren't bad enough.****

"I am every way better," he said, sweeping up several thousand dollars in valuables with a single hand.****

"I am ADONIS!" he cried, perfect teeth glinting in the moonlight, eyes wide with juvenile triumph.****

"Pi", said a voice. Adonis turned around in time to see a dart of movement in the shadows, just a swirl of cloak and a flicker of a black mask against brighter flesh. ****

"It's you isn't it? Where are your wimpy friends?"****

"Pi. Ka-chu." The voice spoke with a shrillness normally associated only with choir boys sitting in an unfortunate position, but for all that it was cold as Pluto and full of understated menace.****

Adonis contorted his face into a petulant expression that mixed fear with outrage, his own voice cracking as it approached the inhuman octave.****

"Is this some kind _joke_?"****

"PIKACHU!" ****

There was a flash of yellow and a noise like a generator blowing a fuse, and the next thing Adonis knew his reinforced titanium suit was being torn off like giftwrap at a greedy child's birthday party. ****

"Okay, I give up, IYAAAWWWWEEEE!"****

Adonis's speech had distorted because he felt something long and sharp tearing through his flesh, accompanied by a sensation akin to having one's prostate examined with a cattle prod. After a few seconds the pain just seemed to blink off, which he vaguely recalled as being a bad sign. Even though he couldn't feel any pain, he felt very wet, and cold, and he could smell something burning. Everything got funny, and very white.****

The yellow monstrosity gnawed on the small turbine that provided power for Adonis's body-suit like a dog chewing a bone, accompanied by unpleasant sucking sounds and crackling. It shook itself to get the blood off in a very un-dog-like manner. It was like a cross between an epileptic fit and a full-body sneeze. The round black eyes full of lightning turned in their masks to meet the shop-keeper.****

"Uh...don't hurt me...good boy..."****

"Pika?" it inquired, small sparks of current shooting off its teeth.****

"KEEP AWAY!" the old man cried as he staggered backwards.****

The two pointy ears drooped, and the creature looked at its lightning-bolt tail and crackling, bloody six-inch claws. It shrunk and managed to look embarrassed, sad, and horribly intimidating all at the same time. Then a police siren whined across the landscape and he turned away, bounding off into the night.


	19. Chapter 19

Chapter 14

**I**

The most exciting thing since my incarceration has happened; there was a break-out! A third of the inmates sprung loose*, all though most of them weren't in the high-security area.  
Apparently, despite all the high-tech gadgetry and state-of-the art security, the people contracted to build the door system used a barely-modified bulk-purchased garage door opener device. Private Hive told me they got contracted for the new military submarine equipped with combat espresso machines and a screen door. The same industry, according to Jinx, designed a bank security vault with a 16-inch steel door, three layers of bullet-proof glass, motion sensors, and a retina ID scan, but didn't include any devices to lock it. It's little events like this that remind me not all criminals wear spandex and rob jewelry stores.

Barely an hour after the breakout, people started getting carted back in. I talked about it at lunch and veteran prisoners tell me such is usually the case in jump city. A bunch of prisoners spring out and go bananas with newfound freedom only to get snapped back up for the next few years because security is always toughest right after a breakout. A few smart ones manage to hide away in the confusion and lay low, but almost always they wind up getting rounded up after a brief fight with the Teen Titans.

I don't know how, but that overcompensating chunkhead Jonny Rancid has managed to evade the long arm of the law. At least I can take comfort in the fact that his burning-bag-of-sewage BO will no longer foul the cafeteria air. Unfortunately, Kitten is still regaling me with the shocking revelation of what her hairdresser's ex-boyfriend had the audacity said to her, and the thrilling exchange of repartee that ensued. She's also informed me that she's planning to try to get out early by appealing to the mercy of the court and using some sob-story blaming her parent, her boyfriend, society, male aggression, and fatty foods. I imagine this aberrational behavior is caused by a small particle of brain lodged in her skull. I'd chew her up thoroughly and take the artificial-blond bimbo in a snap if I wasn't afraid of choking on the protruding bones.  
Speaking of skinny, I can't help but feel a little jealous of Jinx. Yesterday she had two whole tubs of Cookie Dough ice cream and I don't think her stomach even bulged from excess fullness, but with my unique metabolism I've already gained twenty pounds here, and my average meal consists of a meatloaf and whatever dead insects I find against my window. Still, she doesn't flaunt it and complain about her non-existent rolls like some other girls do, and she's very sympathetic, so I shouldn't hold it against her.

The wiry chunkhead by the name of Adonis came back in a truly terrifying state. Something had ripped through his titanium power-suit and most of his ribcage**, and also fried him with enough electricity to short-circuit a shopping mall. I don't dare imagine what kind of horror could cause this, but I think Mad Antimarion has something to do with it. He keeps mumbling about "second-hand" and "the curse", and his weird divination chant is getting more frequent.  
Whatever's roaming the streets, I hope the titans don't catch it. I think I'd never sleep if that unknowable carnage-machine was wheeled into here.

*I stayed in my cell, through a combined sense of civic duty and an awareness that a few inches of bullet-proof glass isn't going to go up just because there's a power fluctuation. **Contrary to popular opinion, a villain's heart is a reddish-purple rather than black

**II**

Clunk. Whirr. scrape. Beep beep.  
Cyborg groaned.  
Clunk. Whirr, scrape. Beep beep.  
Cyborg paused for breath, and then continued his arduous journey up the flight of stairs leading to the main room in titan tower. He held his leg, arm, and liver cradled precariously in one arm while he lurched along under his only good leg, grabbing onto the railing with his mouth for support.  
Clunk. Whirr, scrape. Beep beep.  
"I could have sworn I put an elevator in here," he grumbled through clenched teeth.  
The beeping came up again, a flashing yellow error message appearing on the right side of his field of vision, informing him that several limbs and vital organs were currently inoperable. As a human-mechanoid union, Cyborg had many portions of his body that could feel no pain. This wasn't necessarily a good thing. Humans have pain for a reason; it let's you know there is something wrong and makes sure you do something about it. To compensate, Cyborg created a beeping error message to let him know which parts of his body were out of order and ensure he took care of them.  
Clunk. Whirr, scrape. Beep beep.  
Looking back on it, he probably should have given an override command to turn it off after a while.  
Clunk. Whirr, scrape. Beep beep.  
_"I KNOW dammit! I already know my left arm, right leg, and liver are 'missing and/or damaged'. I'm carrying them in my damn hand!"_ he screamed internally.  
Clunk. Whirr, scrape. Beep beep.  
In retrospect, he should have signaled the other titans, or the jump city police force, assuming those public-funded nimrods could find their own rectums with a flashlight and a search warrant. But he didn't want to be a bother, and besides, he could take care of himself without Robin barking "Titans, go!" all the time, couldn't he?  
Clunk. Whirr, scrape. Beep beep.  
He cursed himself for being such an independent, macho tough-guy blowhard. After all, he had been outnumbered. As a team they'd had too work hard to triumph even with five against three or five against one odds.  
Clunk. Whirr, scrape. Beep beep.  
Had he ever seen those two before? They looked new. He'd remember if he faced them in the past. There was the guy, incredibly tall, thin, femmy and flamboyant with enough eyeliner to grout black bath tiles, and that annoying weedling voice. Of course, for all his fey attitude, he was no wussy. Those were not fingernails, they were bloody claws, and Cyborg had a shade of grudging respect for anybody who could rip through neo-futuristic-sounding-word-titanium alloy with bare hands. And then there was…her.  
Clunk. Whirr, scrape. Beep beep. _Shiver_.  
She hadn't _looked_ dangerous. She had a vague cow-like innocence and placidity about her face, a contented smile that might just be gas. Her hair was a dirty blond, a little uneven, messed up and matted but in a faintly attractive way. Her face was freckled, round, and child-like. She had an awkwardly plump frame, with odd bulges and rolls all over and the sense of a normally chubby girl who had just gained a lot of weight and hadn't quite learned how to move it about properly. Her clothes were ragged and stained, and she had a general impression of self-neglect, somebody who is either incapable of caring for themselves fully or doesn't hold their appearance in any regard. The overall image was that of a soft, shy outcast with a heart of gold.  
Then she grinned, and everything changed.  
It was the kind of grin that a policeman could write up as "threatening an officer" or possibly even "resisting arrest". It gleamed. It forced her lips back past the gums, wrinkling her face into a mask of inhuman longing and malice, forcing her eyes into wicked squints. The worst thing about it was that it showed her teeth, each one at least an inch long, serrated, hooked, and pearl-white.  
He had barely time to scream before she was on him. She bounded after him on all fours like a charging baboon, growling eagerly. Her jaw pulled down, seeming to unhinge, and clamped onto his thigh, rending it from its circuitry. She'd chewed it pensively, sucking and gnawing, sniffing, searching for something edible in the mass of electronics before spitting it out. It didn't help that the fingernail-fruit had already lacerated his arm off halfway.  
Clunk. Whirr, scrape. Beep beep.  
After that they just kept coming back at him. The man, who referred to himself as "Claw", would leap around taunting Cyborg with acrobatics, never staying still long enough to get a good shot with his blaster or getting close enough to strike. Thanks to the man's lanky form, he had superior reach by seven inches, and those seven little inches made a big difference. Meanwhile the girl, Maw he had called her, Cyborg didn't know if she could speak, would just go all out. She came at him, and came at him again, tearing, biting, gulping, and making spaghetti out of his body-armor and bionics to search for something warm and gooey inside. Whenever one of them got in trouble they would come to the other's aid. When he'd pinned Claw's arms, Maw bit him in the ass. When he had Maw in a headlock, Claw tried to poke his eyes out. The girl actually scarfed down his kidney like a hash brown, and was about to make off with his liver before the help arrived.  
Who would have thought, Cyborg, Teen Titan, super hero, got his ass saved by a tubby self-styled private eye with a handgun? The girl got one warning shot to the jaw, and the man had an induced stigmata worked into both hands. As they had whimpered and clutched their wounds, Cyborg had just enough time to womp them over the head with his own limbs. After that, the trenchcoat-wearing good sumaritan had given him a ride back to the tower. He just wished he could remember the benevolent gumshoe's name. Something Noir. Gus Noir? Jane Noir? Cy Noir? He had never really gotten a good enough look to tell if the bulgy figure was a he or a she. Could have been Minnesotan from the accent. Oh well.  
Clunk. Whirr, scrape. Bleep bleep. Click.  
Cyborg hopped into the main room overlooking the harbor and took stock of his surroundings. Terra was their, chewing on something unidentifiable. Starfire was also there, looking worried. And there was…something, chained up, in a cage. It was small, about a foot in height, yellow, and furry, with a lightning-bolt tail and a curious raccoon-like mask-mark across it's…  
He'd known, but he'd never thought it would go this far.  
"Robin?" he asked. Terra and Starfire nodded, and the creature squeaked a curt affirmation.  
Cyborg collapsed gratefully as the burden of consciousness fled from him.

**III**  
When Cyborg came to, the first thing he saw was a terrible apparition. Two huge, multifaceted, unblinking green eyes stared at him like a hive of jade hornets. A pair of mandibles dripping acrid saliva clacked and waved inches away from his small area of unprotected living flesh. The figure in front of him was clutching a diamond-head power drill in one hand and a soldering iron in the other.  
'AAAAAYEEEK!" Cyborg said.

The apparition dropped its tools and flipped up its magnifying-goggles.  
"ah, you are a wakened. It is good to see you up and running friend Cyborg," Starfire said.

"Gbrhk," said Cyborg, because his brain was busy trying to restart his heart.

"As much as I wish to engage in pleasant discourse with you Cyborg, we must attend to friend Robin's dilemma," she said, her tone gentle but firm. She raised the quasi-mechanoid to his feet, and dragged him* over to the main room of the building, where they rejoined Terra, Beast Boy, and a very disgruntled looking 2ft yellow rodent in a silver cage. The rays of morning light swept over their faces, tinting the usual peach, brown, green, and orange skin tones with faint blues, livid pinks, and umbral purples, making everything seem unearthly and dream-like.

"I do not understand," Starfire said. "Why does the daylight not cause Robin to resume his human form?"  
Cyborg blinked and shook his head, rattling some loose transistors into place. "That does seem odd."  
He paused for thought while Beast Boy yawned and Terra pensively downed a few spoonfuls of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs.  
"This whole thing is weird, at least by werewolf standards. I'm not an expert, but don't lycanthropes usually change during the full moon and change back? Robin's been just…changing, getting more and more…pika-ish every day."  
"M-m-maybe it's some kiiind of gen-n-etic retro-virus," Beast Boy said, brushing crumbs of eye-boogers and trying to stifle yawns.

"No," Cyborg said firmly. "That couldn't happen because genetic retro-viruses are just something out of science fiction. A virus reproduces itself by destroying the host cell, so anything that changed the DNA without destroying the cells would be impossible to propagate."

"Pikachu." Robin said dejectedly.

"Maybe it's just a curse…you know, like the spell he got hit with gradually changes him into something else?" Terra suggested.

Robin blinked, and then hopped in his cage, sparking and waving his tail excitedly.  
"Pikachu, pi-pika pii!"

"I think he's trying to tell us something," said Beast Boy.

"What is it boy?" Cyborg asked, moving closer to the cage.

Robin screwed up his face in an attempt at a nefarious smile, teased his ears into a curling horshoe-like horn-shape, and performed a series of acrobatic maneuvers. He then waved his hands, and made a sound to indicate a zapping effect, then clapped his awkward stubby arms together with a loud "Pi-KA!" as if to indicate an explosion.

The titans frowned at this elaborate pantomime.  
"There's a demonic acrobat trying to blow up the damn?" Terra suggested.  
"The city is at risk from a psionic jovian ungulate?" Starfire guessed.  
"Dr. Light is on the loose?" Cyborg attempted.  
"Little Timmy fell down the well?" Beast Boy ventured.

Robin shook his head and gave high-pitched but clearly demoralized sigh. Why was it always so easy in TV and movies? Lassie somehow managed to indicate the nature of a small kid's improbable mishap with a few barks, and Scooby-Doo had managed to emulate any villain possible by standing on his hind legs, sucking in his chest, and going "Roooo!"** He could probably just transfer his one-word message in a telekinetic shout, if only Raven were-

Robin shook his little head, curled up, and steamed. He gnawed his tail pensively, trying to clear the unpleasant thoughts and inner pain with a healthy dose of the outer variety. He gave a small "Pik!" of alarm as he felt a stab of pain and the oily metal taste of blood. As he sucked at his self-inflicted tail injury, he got an idea.

"Look!" Terra shouted, somewhat unnecisarily, as everyone had fixed full attention on their transmuted team-mate. Robin had fiercely chewed at the his tiny wrist, despite the obvious pain, until it had a steadily squirting wound. It was a thin stream of blood, but it was coming out very fast. He seemed to take this self-inflicted injury with a stoic satisfaction, and was aiming his hand to concentrate the coursing blood into a small pool in a depression in the floor.  
The thought crept over the other titans like a swarm of ants. They all flew for the cage door, but Cyborg managed to muscle in first and squeezed Robin's arm to cease circulation and prevent the attempt at suicide.  
"Pika-CHU!" Robin shouted in frustration and rage, and a scrambling electromagnetic charge sent Cyborg staggering back. Seven-hundred pounds of metal plus a spam-can's worth of flesh careened into the other titans, forcing them back and pinning them to the floor. Four pairs of eyes stared as the raccoon-faced pocket monster began calmly dipping its tail into the steaming pool of its own blood.

**IV**  
Starfire gathered her strength and pushed the sputtering Cyborg off of her. Terra and Beast Boy were still stunned from the impact, and she flew alone towards her enchanted ally with total purpose and-

Stopped. Starfire's faceted pupils focused at the streaks of blood, and she stood calmly in front of the battered cage, with a look of patient acceptance. Terra and Beast Boy rose up to approach, but Starfire held each of them back, lifting them into their unharmed but helpless, like a lioness carrying a cub by the scruff of it's neck.

"What's WRONG with you Starfire?" Beast Boy shouted as he struggled.

"Don't you care?" Terra asked.

"Read," Starfire commanded.

Beast Boy and Terra's eyes widened as they focused on the pattern formed by Robin's streaks of blood. Slowly, in their minds, the curves and lines of dark crimson transformed into a single word.

*Starfire was probably the only team member that could drag a seven-hundred pound cyborg  
**Plain and simple, Scooby-Doo is lame.

**V**  
The word was: Jinx.


	20. Chapter 20

**I**  
The room was filled with that peculiar octivated "thwack" sound that you only get when a cyborg, a Tameranian, an elf-eared shapeshifter, and a human girl all smack their foreheads at the same time.

Jinx staggered into the interrogation room, yawning expansively, bleary eyed, her hair formations drooping but firm like the horns of a Tibetan yak. Her tall narrow form bent and wobbled uncertainly, like a patched-up telephone pole in a high wind. On either side of her was a rather disgruntled special force guard, one of them nursing a hand with only two fingers. In her hands, the groggy sorceress clutched a dusty book, bound in leather of dubious origins, embossed with ivory letters and book-clasps that looked as if they had been fashioned from human teeth, and lettered in a dark reddish-brown and spidery script.

"This better be worth waking me up," Jinx said, as she slumped sulkily into the comfortable chair.

Beast Boy stared at her quizzically. "It's two-thirty in the afternoon."

"I like to sleep late," she said defensively.

"Let's get to business," Cyborg said. "We gave you what you wanted. Year supply, Neapolitan flavor, delivered on request. Now it's your turn to uphold your end of the bargain."

Starfire reached down and dropped 13 pounds of extremely cross yellow rodent onto the table.

"Turn this back into Robin", Cyborg commanded.

Jinx stared at the shape before her. Her eyes widened, and it took a few minutes for her brain to connect the image emblazoned on her retina with a 16-bit image from a game-boy screen.

"But…"

"Yes?" Stafire, Terra, Cyborg, and Beast Boy asked, leaning forward.

"But…he's sooo **cute** like this!" she squealed, causing the titans to snap back.

Jinx's hair sprang back to its usual alignment. Her eyes grew heart-shaped and pink, her body disproportionately tiny and her legs and arms vague elongations, a pink-and-yellow backround swirled behind her as she emitted a flood of floating hearts into the air.

"It is true that Robin's appearance is even more endearing than usual," Starfire said*, as if sounding out a new scientific theory.

Robin pressed his hands against his cheeks, gave a hemmerhoid-sufferer grunt, and there was a small thunderclap. Jinx determined from the unpleasant tingling sensation and 2nd-degree burns that Robin did not wish to be referred to as "cute".

At that tactful moment, the water appeared with a glass of mineral water to put out the small fire on the sorceress's hair and take orders.

"So," Jinx said, tactfully teasing her hair into shape and brushing off the burnt cloth, "I'm the only one who can help you out of this…situation?"

"If you weren't, do you think we'd be asking you for help?" Terra said bluntly.

"Well then, speaking hypothetically, what would there be to stop me from getting more out of the deal?" Jinx said, her finger wrapped in a spike of purple-pink hair, her voice not changing by a half-note.

Starfire smiled at her. It was a very wide smile. It showed her clean, white teeth, her dark-red tongue, her second row of teeth and retractable fangs. Out of the smile, she extended her two dark-green mandibles, with ragged serrations capable of slicing through a lead pipe, dripping with phosphorescent saliva.

"Right, right! No problem. Just speaking hypothetically," Jinx said, taking a renewed interest in the weathered occult tome, sweat streaming down her brow and teeth chattering like a pair of castanets in a nuclear-powered washing machine.

She carefully unclasped the book, murmuring the words "Klatu, Verata," and something unintelligible that began with the letter N. Dust swirled. The air in the room stirred. Pages flipped back and forth from a nonexistent gust of wind. Slowly the lights dimmed, and a strong, chemical smell filled the air. There was a soft, distant thumping noise. Muffled moans and screams drifted on the edge of hearing. The floorboards began to rise under the carpeting, and green light spilled forth. A bulge in the carpet radiated steam and intense phosphorescence, and the book seemed to chuckle mockingly. The unseen thing rose higher, rolling towards the titans like a wave and-

"Stop that!" *thwack* "No! Bad book. Bad!"

Jinx struck the book firmly again with her spoon, rebuking it repeatedly in a strong, authoritative voice. The book emitted a series of short yelps and a whine, then the phantasmagoria around them recoiled and vanished like an open wallet in a New York subway.

A rather shaken waiter then presented them with their dishes. Cyborg got a steak with some potatoes au gratin and a glass of beer. Beast Boy received a deluxe veggie burger and a soymilk. Starfire tucked into some oysters and artichokes, consuming the shells and waxy leaves with equal vigor and washing them down with a flagon of antifreeze. The waiter considered approaching Robin with a bowl of hamster pellets and some fresh carrot, but a crackle of sparks and a low growl convinced him otherwise. Terra was presented with towering plate of sauce-slathered pasta, a ring of sushi, a boiled lobster, and what appeared to be a small roasted pig. She turned and grinned at Beast Boy, who gave her a smile back and a thumbs up, patted her not-exactly-flat stomach, licked her lips, and then fell face-forward into her plate.**

Jinx patiently tucked into her mandarin orange chicken, flipped to a certain page with her eyes closed, and began to read.

*Beast Boy thought so too, but as an insecure adolescent male he would sooner eat hamster cage waste than admit to considering anything other than an appropriate age-range female "cute".

**This was her traditional approach to table manners. The other titans decided to assume she wasn't choking as long as they heard noises of ingestion after Starfire's over-ambitious Heimlich maneuver resulted in a fractured spine.

**II**

Jinx read out the text of the leering lexicon with a deep, resonant, harsh voice in between bites of savory poultry and sips of something pink and fizzy. It didn't exactly sound like somebody else was talking, but rather as if Jinx was speaking through a darth-vader voice modulator or a sound-studio devices, that teeth-buzzing octivation associated with masked phone calls and sinister villains whose face is not revealed until the final episode.

"_Among the werebeasts and lunar shapeshifters, nuhn is az cryptick and literallee unaturalle as the Were-Pikachu, or Lepis Indendiarus. The were-pikachu is a hybridization of the Rase of Mann with a speciae of beast which either no longer or never did exist in the worlde of Menn. It is created from a Humann subject with a Forbidden Incantation, the precise nature of which is a secret unknown to These Authores and This Tome. The prevailing wisdommee holds that some sample of once-living matter from the Pikachu or some being relatable to it is required, although how such a thing could be acquired of a purely phantastick beastee is unknowne. Another reagent is a likeness of the animal in question, carven all in gold, which must be used in conjuction with yee former component for yee Magikee to take full effect._

Like all of its dimorphic kindred, the were-pikachu fears the bite of silver, and is not easily harmed by other means. It can assume yee shape of a full pikachu, but since such a creature is not extant in God's infinite creation, the disguising benefits of this are null. Instead, the were-pikachu prefereth to take upon a hybrid shape, which it can do so under any amount of moonlight. (Foote Note: During the Full Moon, transformation of yee man-beast is involuntary, and during the New Moon it be impossible. During all the gradients in between, the were-pikachu can voluntarily transform itself or be induced by moonlight to change, but the ease of resisting and difficulty in voluntarily shifting increases during the waning of the moon, and likewise the ease of change and difficulty to resist rise while the moon waxeth.)  
The Hybrid Shape is the greatest power of the were-pikachu, for in this form it combines the best of Pikachu and Mann, with the addition of unearthly elements unique to were-beasts. Its strength is moderately increased, but much greater is the rise in agility and speed. It gains long, sabre-like claws of preternatural cutting power possessed in neither shape, and these claws are accompanied by an electrical discharge. It can unleash charges of power from its cheeks, and a group of the beings can summon forth and direct a full-strength lightening bolt if there be so much as a single cloud in the sky. The beast displays several signs of its nature, some high voice or decidedly "adorable" physical features or manners of habit, but most noticeably is the dietary craving for a seasoned tomato-paste and some manner of electrically conducive fluids. The were-pikachu is not inherently evil, as are the were-wolf and were-rat, nor predilicted towards good, as is the case of the were-bear. Rather the creature becomes extremely impulsive and efflusive, acting by instinct and emotion alone. It may become unintentionally destructive, but it will not knowingly go against the grain of its essential behavior.

A personage afflicted by the curse can be cured with a standard curse-breaking disenchantment or a dispelling of the afflicting magic, but such an action requires that the breaker be of greater power than he who wrought the curse. An afflicted can be cured by imbuing an elixir of Friar's COwl, but be warned that any useful concoction will still retain the plant's natural properties."

**III**  
"Well, *crunch*, that sounds *CRACK* reasonable enough, does it not? If this earth-herb can cure *masticate* Robin of his *kra-kack* affliction, then we must acquire it *crunch crunch* for him," Starfire said, noisily chewing the oyster shells and an occasional pearl.

"Friar's Cowl," Beast Boy said thoughfully, shifting the partially-masticated veggie burger to the side of his mouth so he could devote his full neural faculties to thought process. "That's monkshood , or wolfbane, scientific name _Aconitum Napellus_," he announced.

After a short pause and some surprised looks, the green polymorph said "What? I heard about it on discovery channel."

Cyborg frowned, browsing an internal encyclopedia for more information. He nearly choked as a sudden shock caused a section of quasi-masticated bovine flesh to slip into his windpipe. When he cleared his throat of the obstruction, he announced hoarsely "Aconitum Napellus is poisonous."

**IV**  
"So he'll be cured, but dead?" Beast Boy spouted incredulously.

"That does NOT sound like an advisable strategy!" Starfire snarled, her eye-facets gleaming like a pair of emeralds in a solar flare, extra teeth extending, hand unconsciously working the salad fork into a lump of molten metal.

Some muffled grunts of outrage and disapproval came out of the quickly diminishing pile of food that presumably had Terra somewhere in it.

"Pi-pi pi PIKACHU!" Robin exclaimed angrily, waving his stubby arms in indignation.

"Hold on, hold on!" Jinx implored, waving her hands in a supplicating gesture. "It's just a poison. We can still give him an antidote afterwards."

The assembled heroes settled before her. Starfire retracted her mandibles, Cyborg relaxed his hand and let the fine powder of what had been a fork fall from it, Beast Boy eased back uncertainly, the food-pile that contained Terra altered in pitch from a discontented rumble to a steady suction, and Robin subsided to a few sparks and sulky glares.

"Anyway, I think I might want to read more into this. He should have reverted to human form as soon as the daylight touched him. This is all just too…wrong." She wrinkled her face and teased her hair with an intensity that suggested she was trying to use it for leverage to yank out her brain.

"It doesn't matter", Cyborg said. "Our only priority is to cure Robin."

"Alright then," said Jinx, with the resigned shrug of somebody who does not truly care whether they succeed or fail, but wants to make sure their warning is out so they have a defensive "I told you so" in case everything goes to pieces later and they get blamed. "Although he really is just tooo cute this way," she said, puckering her lips in a motion of condescending adoration before snapping back to a calculated blank look.


	21. Chapter 21

**I**  
Journal Number 5

I've started numbering my journal/diary/review entries. Looking back on the previous ones, I think I must have gotten them mixed up or completely lost track of time, since my second entry mentions having spent three days in prison, while the previous entry starts with "Day nine". Ergo, my introduction of a numbering system to keep track of it all. But enough meta-journalling.

Jinx didn't show up for lunch today, which is odd. I found myself faced with the choice of horrors. I could sit next to the angry midget and the geektacular vaguely-scottish adolescent, a girl with angle-like wings held against her body by an uncomfortable looking golden chain, and a creepy caped fellow with red eyes and a silver collar who was eerily silent. It was either that, or sit next to Kitten. I looked at the nerd, the enraged oompa-loompa, the aerially gifted girl, and the mute with glowing eyes. Then I looked at Kitten, the normal-human child. I thought about her latest non-stop litany, which was a complaint about the prison's lack of sufficient grooming products, particularly in the area of intimiate hygiene, and went into far more detail than necessary.

Lunch was just horrible. On one end of the table, a detailed discussion as to whether elves were underpowered when compared with gnomes had reached such intensity that the lawn-ornament known as Gizmo was physically climbing up the fat nerdy guy to give him a piece of his mind, while the latter was trying to drive him back in a mixture of righteous indignation and rising panic by belting him on the head with a spoon. The angel-type was chewing through a tuna sandwich and a slice of light fluffy cake with a kind of prolonged savoring usually reserved for decades-old wines. She conversed periodically with the red-eyed kid, asking him yes-or-no questions to get a subtle nod or a soft shake of the head in return, but she stared at me a lot when she thought I wasn't looking. (Another perk of my hybrid physiology is I have incredible peripheral vision).

I hope Jinx shows up again soon. I don't think I can take much more of this. That Gizmo character reminds me so much of a shrew, with his belligerent, almost paranoid demeanor, darting movements, and those beady white eyes, I don't think my self-control would last for more than four days, tops.  
The greasy nerd, porky as he is, wasn't a tough test of self-restraint because of the smell. I had to bite my tongue half the time to keep from passing out; it's like dead grizzly bear and gouda.  
Even if I wanted to talk to somebody, I couldn't manage more than a few words under the weight of all that red-eyed kid's listening. It never struck me before how much of a presence silence can have. You can feel the sound collapsing into whatever passes for his ears like a sinking Spanish galleon, and the dull, cold pressure of unspoken words bubbling in every movement and gesture, crying to be set free.  
Then as if wasn't uncomfortable enough, trying to eat with two beams of red light pointed at you, there was the angle-girl. She spent every chance she got looking at me with a hungry expression I can only describe as hawk-like.

I was pretty shook up after lunch, and my meatloaf might have been a little past its expiration due to the fact that it kept trying to crawl off my plate and mate with the au gratin potatoes. Maybe that explains the dream I had.

**II**  
I wasn't in the mood for a journal entry , so I just curled up and dozed off for want of something better to do.

I dreamed I was in my old house, or maybe it was just an old house, and I was walking down a hall I'd never been in before. There were pictures of cartoon characters on the wall, and whenever I looked into a room there was nothing in it but old furniture and skeletons. At one point I saw a mirror, with a beard and hair on it, and for some reason that frightened me more than any of the skeletons had, and I smashed the mirror and ran down the hallway.  
I ran past the rooms again, and all the doors were open. The skeletons asked me if I wanted to come in for tea, but I couldn't stop because I knew there was something behind me, something very old and slow. When I reached the end of the hallway, I ran down the flight of stairs and opened the first door I came to, but I was in the hallway again, and there was the horrible little mirror, my own wide-eyed face staring back at me obscured by a beard and hair.  
I smashed the mirror again, and this time water started spilling out. I tried to get in the boat, but I couldn't reach it, and I just sank into the water. I drifted through it, bubbles rising up around me, and then everything changed. The water melted into mist, and there was a very bright flash of blue. I saw him there, Mad Antimarion, standing right in front of me, hair splayed, eyes not quite pointing in the same direction, wearing nothing but a catheter and a grave expression.  
He reached his hand out and offered me a book, free, gratis. I looked down at it. The words on it were all hazy, but I didn't like the look of it.  
"Take it", he said, speaking in words for the first time. "It's a book of spells, you can use it real easy. **He** will help you."  
"No," I said. "It's a bad book."  
"I'll leave it for you under the shell," he said. He pressed the book into my hand, and I felt horribly revolted and violated. I couldn't have been more disgusted and upset if he had stuck his hand into my crotch. I leaped back, trying to throw it away, and I screamed, and the sound of my own scream woke me up.

I still haven't worked up the courage to look under the shell yet.

**III**  
Darkness.

A single match flared, a mote of blue in a thin droplet of orange glow, tickling the night. Its only companion was a dead red glow, as small and distant as solar wind, the visual equivalent of an empty ringing in the ears or a radiator's hum.  
The match lowered. Its feeble light fell upon a smooth waxy surface and a wick..  
The flame sputtered, lent, and caught. A flicker of blue and orange sparked violently, then the flame grew and turned to a steady, spectral green.

By the fire of the same match, another candle was lit, and another, each the same eerie emerald glow, seven in all. Their poisonous, juicy light reached up to encircle the faces of the Teen Titans, caressing them like the fondling hands of an aging pervert and distorting them like a childhood accident with a meat grinder.

Cyborg's steel and blue frame became alive with glistening radioactive light, too bright, too keen, as if he was some video-game nemesis brought to life by a demonically possessed computer or a freak electrical storm. The glow was a mix of smoky aquamarine matte and unrealistic plutonium green. The glowing red eye just looked like a blood clot on the surface of a sepulchral searchlight.

Terra's long blond hair was a toxic-lime net that filtered the light, glowing like highlighter on a sunlit day or subterranean fungi on a deformed corpse, leaving her face in a veil of shadow that encouraged the imagination. Her more recent veil of plumpness was stripped away by the mind's eye, leaving instead the implication of jutting, naked, gleeful bone and a deaths-head grimace. I bit of pasta sauce smeared her cheek and a strip of chicken, and any person with the slightest degree of imagination would have said that the dark textured dribble reminded them of drying blood and human entrails far more than Italian food. Whenever the light shifted slightly enough to reveal that indeed meat cushioned the skeletal frame, the unflattering glow implied it was a scar-on-scar stolen collection of molten flesh, ripped from the unwilling by marrow-blunted teeth. The two eyes set in the face of shadow continually alternated between grotesque vacancy and malicious keenness.

Starfire had never looked less human. The green light enhanced her, embraced her, enlarged every feature and tint that did not belong on earth until she made the sleek chitinous creature in "Alien" appear as powerful and threatening as a dead kitten.  
Her eyes were metaphysical constellations, each facet blazing with the intensity of a nova and the focus of a gun-sight laser in what seemed more than just reflection in this preternatural light. Each facet of the compound eyes was a trapped soul, all of them crying out screams of light, begging the observer either to release or to join them. Every line of her body went wrong, perfectly comfortable in a pose that should have been mind-killing agony to a human body. Everything in her that was sharp or jutting loomed into foreground, floating ahead like baleful phantasms. Her sharp, serrated chitin and three rows of teeth gleamed like polished jade. Her prehensile tongue reached and writhed like a groping, animate, severed phallus. The curve claws on the end of her arms reached and glinted with matte glow. The hair seemed to sway and wriggle lazily, like sedated bloodworms. Clothing, neon blue in the green light, stretched and strained like the Greek legend Echidna's labia, waiting to burst forth with a new wave of monsters to plague the blue planet. The bare midriff gleamed in an unseemly manner, the vague indentation that appeared in place of a navel seemed as grotesque and abominable as a naked eye-socket.

Even the innocent childishness of Beast Boy was warped by this rotten-copper phosphorescence. Opening up to soak in the caustic glow, his eyes seemed to bright and shiny, as glossy and mad as those of a flightless bird. His whole skin was alive with a panoply of brightness. In that radioactive iridescence, his small wiry form looked more like the angry shape of a diseased reeses monkey or the beginning stages of some non-linear lycanthropic affliction than a morphologically gifted person of color.

Robin shivered in agitation. His beady little Pikachu eyes gleamed unpleasantly. They did not look at all like gaps of emptiness or holes into some nether other-world. Rather they looked like great dark marks of oily slickness, gleaming like black bug blood. His teeth flashed. His skin was an acidic yellow-green, a color when expected to see dripping from a snake being milked or bubbling in a bio-chemical warfare lab. The overall impression was that some thing crawled out of hell had captured a raccoon, rabbit, or similar cuddly animal, skinned it alive, worn its tanned hide, and by some unhallowed osmosis the adorable frame had transformed as the hellish essence leaked out.

Jinx stretched luxuriantly. The light did not distort, malform, or warp her features. The green light _loved_ her. It embraced her form, highlighted her minimal curves, skipped over her flaws, and made her into a demigoddess of luscious passion. It hugged like a an effluent female friend. It condensed and rolled across her, dripping off her form like friendly blood.

Jinx reached up towards the sky, inhaled deeply the thick, citrus, coppery, incense air, took the items conveyed by the dumbwaiter and put them at the center of the table.

"Let the magic begin," she announced.

**IV**  
Jinx carefully lifted up Robin. When he growled and sparked at her, she smiled at him broadly and said "Look, this curse-breaking stuff requires your cooperation. If you bite me or fidget too much, you'd better get used to hamster food." Thereafter he became nearly rigid with passivity*.  
"Cyborg," Jinx said, with the unquestionable authority of a third grade teacher with a name like "Ms. Anthracite" and a hairbun tight enough bend steel around, "tie pi-Robin up with this chord. Beast Boy, fetch me the mortar and pestle, mixed herbs, witchazel, seven sprigs of belladonna, and the aspirin bottle. Starfire, Terra, I need you to help me stir."

Terra hesistated. "Why do you need both of us just to help you stir?"  
"Because," Jinx said in a voice suggesting a heroic effort of patience on the part of the speaker, "we don't have a mother here, so I'll have to make do with another maiden and a murderer."  
Terra stared at her, uncomprehendingly. "Starfire didn't mur-"  
"Witches rockhead, witches," Jinx said admonishingly.  
Terra stared vacantly.  
"Oh never mind. It's not vital anyway," she said, waving a hand dismissively.  
Starfire and Terra reluctantly gripped the long willow-branch stirring spoon.

Beast Boy came back uncertainly, holding some plant-based medicines, a concrete block, and a handgun.

"I said **pestle**, not **pistol**. Stop playing around Beast Boy."

Jinx hauled out a huge, black, iron pot of clear cold water. The green light glimmered off of it, making the still waters seem like a phosphorescent sea. She dumped in the witchhazel and began to stir.

"Double double, love-life trouble, suppress the stress to brew and bubble," Jinx chanted in a dry, low, voice.  
Terra and Starfire worked with her, churning the unwieldy stick to mix the witchazel with the water.  
"There's some rowan wood under the cauldron that needs lighting. Starfire, could you oblige us? The book says that magic rituals work better with as much green fire as possible, especially if it comes from an unusual source."  
Starfire unleashed a few small starbolts and the fire flared up with green light. It cooled to an amber color, unnatural but soothing and somehow warmer than the green candle flames.  
Jinx rolled back her head and uttered the next verse.  
"Double double, love-life trouble, teenage passions broil, redouble,  
Break the hymen, bite the balls  
Kingdom comes, kingdom falls,  
Rome and Chicago burned, in the all-killing fire  
Art and life are driven, on teenage desire  
Baptise with blood among the rubble  
Chests mature, chins sprout stubble"

She paused her improbable litany and lapsed again into silent stirring. Terra had chuckled at some of the words, but her sense of humor had been quietly strangled by the glowing eyed glare Jinx administered to her. When Beast Boy returned with the mortar and pestle, Jinx motioned for the girls to keep stirring, and poured the herbs and aspirin into the bowl. She mashed the pills and plant-parts with violent intensity, as if each one of the dark green leaves and white tablets had been mocking and assaulting her since grade school and only now did she have the opportunity to give the little bastards what they deserved. In time with the rhythmic thumping and sickening grind of her tools, she chanted again.

"Double double, love-life trouble, stars that can't be seen from hubble  
This boy's bewitched by magics fell  
Some conjurings straight outta hell  
Fiction-made flesh, poor pikachu  
Make him well, herbs of virtue  
By the power of spell and rune  
Setting sun and rising moon"

She did not pause in her pounding, but her face relaxed a little. "Beast Boy, sponge my forehead."  
Beast Boy hesitated. "Why?"  
"Surgeon's have somebody to sponge their forehead, and their just cutting apart and stitching up a person's body, and this is the first time I've done this, and I'm under a lot of stress because I know from the warnings in the book that if I screw this part up, we might be cleaning Robin-chu off the walls with a hose. Now quit asking silly questions and sponge my forehead!"  
Beast Boy obediently dabbed away the rivulets of perspiration.

"By the willow's healing power  
By the coming of the hour"

Jinx inhaled deeply through her nose, then let out a breath through her mouth. "Sponge my forhead."  
Beast Boy obediently dabbed.

"By the herb of lycanthrope's bane  
Make this monster whole again"

Jinx poured the mixture of herb, flower, and pill into the pot. The resulting fluid turned a chalky blue and began to give off sparks. She grabbed the handle like an ex-husband's neck and helped Terra and Starfire stir until the mixture turned the dull red of a dying sun.

She made three, strong stirs, then turned around and gently rapped her fingers on the table to draw everyone's attention.  
"Alright, before I finish this, I need to know, who here is a virgin?"

This unexpected interrogation was met with a chorus of stammering uneasy responses.  
"Well, it may surprise you," Beast Boy began, "but-"  
"Oh come on," said Cyborg, with barely a quiver in his voice, "You know that I-"  
"Umm…Well, dead can't create life, so it's not procreation and…or, does losing it in a bicycle accident count?" Terra stammered, trying to nervously poke her fingers together and missing.  
"Um…err, what is this 'virgin' of which you speek? Kadflax, kaphooey phooey. I do not understand your 'earth-virgin' word concept," Starfire stammered, trickling yellow sweat and twittering her wing buds nervously.

Jinx raised up a hand to silence them all. "Just forget it, I don't want to hear your evasions." She sighed, and tried to repress a giggle.  
"Beast Boy, come over hear," she instructed firmly.  
Beast Boy hesitated only a moment, then toddled over to her anxiously.  
"Stick your arm out over the cauldron," she said, firmly but not harshly.  
Beast Boy obeyed. Jinx carefully reached over and looked closely at the arm, as if inspecting it for ticks. She inhaled deeply, then bit clean through it.

Beast Boy blinked stupidly for a second, then let out a glass-cracking scream as a geyser of blood sprayed from his arm. Jinx held it firmly to ensure the vast majority of the arterial fluid landed in the bubbling brew. She let it go on for what must have seemed hours. Beast Boy was beginning to slacken and turn yellow when she let go, and he stumbled a little before closing the wound by shrinking into a sea urchin. Jinx set back to stirring and announced in a high, clear voice,

"To heal the mix of spirit and mud  
Add a quart of virgin's BLOOD!"

*Being passive without in any way relaxing is all part of the Zen of Robin.

**V**  
The fire rose up. A wind stirred the air, and the candle flames sputtered. The cauldron gave off a huge cloud of acrid steam. At the bottom sloshed a meager measure of fluid the color of radioactive urine, whether by the distorting touch of the green light or some phosphorescent property of the brew.

"Cyborg," Jinx intoned coldly. Cyborg jolted upright. He had nothing to occupy him for the duration of the ritual after tying up Robin, and had quietly dozed off listening to an internal Simon and Garfunkle mix.

"Hw-yes?" he asked, trying to look attentive and choking back a yawn brought on by the thick scented air.

"Fetch the antidote and be ready. Administer it…the rabies way."

Cyborg winced and nodded solemnly, then brought a syringe of dark green fluid with a needle the size and shape of a railroad spike.

"Alright," Jinx said, ladeling three heaping spoonfuls of the noxious syrup into a glass vial, "You drink this all up. I hope you're good at suppressing your gag reflex." She put the spoon down on the table, where it turned blue and gave off smoke.

Robin-pikachu swallowed and twitched his tail nervously, and then proceeded to lap the mixture up. He managed to convey, with his limited facial capacity, that he had eaten better tasting bird droppings*. After that, a slow change came over him. His features went slack, his limbs hung, his tail lost its rigidy, and his entire body sagged. His skin flashed green before reaching a distinctly bluish color, and then things got a little weird. His nose and eyes began drifting around his face like model airplane parts sliding on useless model glue. His limbs stretched and bent at improbable angles. His entire body began to vibrate and give off a noise like a rusted Oldsmolbile revving its engine. His face straightened out into a rictus of pain, features fixed in Picasso-like positions. His color shifted to a sunburnt pink, and his limbs withdrew into his body and his tail spaghettied into an untidy heap. The adolescents witnessing this feat of rapid transmogrification could only stare on with muted horror and revulsion. Robin-chu gave a small hiccup, and then exploded in a burst of flatulent orange light.

When the air cleared, Robin was lying on the table, slightly scorched and dazed but otherwise unhurt, and markedly human. He sneezed a few times and adjusted his eyemask.

"Never speak of this a-what are you all staring at? Haven't you ever seen a boy wonder before?" Robin demanded. "I've still got my mask on don't I?"

Cyborg had put his hand over one eye and quietly shattered the red LED in his mechanical one. Jinx was staring at him, eyes halfway lowered, with a rather worrying expression of intensity. Starfire had her head cocked and her inner eyelids shut, but the green glow showed through creating the impression of glowing sockets, and her mouth was dribbling something citric-smelling. Terra had both hands over her eyes, but was somewhat furtively and intensely peaking through the gaps between her fingers.

Beast Boy could have said a number of things. Humorous, sitcom-esque replies crowded his mind and tripped over each other, so one of the slower, lamer ones got through.

"I thought robins where supposed to have red breasts," he said, though his snarky tone was somewhat dulled by shock.

Robin looked down and deftly shielded himself from view with a strategically placed candle.

*sadly true. Never stand looking up with your mouth open in a city with a pidgeon problem.


	22. Chapter 22

**I**  
The Teen Titans all clustered around the television, enjoying some well-deserved rest and relaxation after their prior occult ordeal. Robin was sitting a calculated four inches from Starfire, contentedly munching a mustard-drabbled hot-dog*, darting furtive half-conscious looks at her when he thought she wasn't looking. Starfire was enjoying a bowl of caramel-dipped old socks sprinkled with mustard seeds, and a couple of cricket-pops, gazing at the pretty colors and random noises on the television, while furtively checking out Robin when she thought he wasn't looking.** Cyborg was crunching caramel popcorn, browsing the internet in vain hopes of finding a decent Blade Runner fanfiction. Beast Boy was eating some ketchup-coated vegetable tempura, and snuggling up against Terra. In turn, Terra was working her way through an economy-size bag of sour cream and onion potato chips and a Big Gulp soda, and had an arm possessively wrapped around Beast Boy.

It was a nice enough scene, but if you looked at it long enough you couldn't help but feel that something was lacking. There was a certain absence of silence, a wrongness in the Brownian motion of are molecules. It was like the dent left in a couch by long use, only transposed into a certain section of the air. Some psychological incompleteness added a tinny, superficial note to the soft sounds of merriment. The beep and hum of the wireless modem in Cyborg's elbow, the crunching and slurping of Terra's relentless mastication, and the shattering of glass as somebody burst in through the window.

The ghastly sight before them looked like the lovechild of a helicopter and a mechanical spider. It had a crackling field of energy around it, outlining it like a reverse-shadow.

"**Overload will destroy titan-children things! **" it roared.

Robin backflipped off the couch.  
"Titans, defend!"

_  
*After the whole were-pikachu business he had sworn off ketchup for life  
** Because Starfire had great peripheral vision and Robin had an eye-mask on, it was hard for either party to notice when they were being looked at, which explains a lot about their relationship.

**THE END**


End file.
